A long, long time ago, in the mid-1980s, the Saatchi Gallery opened in Boundary Road in north-west London. The gallery was very white and light, very spacious, and had a tendency simultaneously to overwhelm and to aggrandise the works of art displayed in it. The art itself, bought and owned, then, by Charles and Doris Saatchi, was mostly Minimalist and mostly American: trembling white-on-white paintings by Robert Ryman; daunting, curved walls of cor-ten steel by Richard Serra; mute, self-possessed arrangements of tiles or firebricks by Carl Andre. Most of it was of museum quality, a fact which underlined the superiority of the Saatchi holdings in American post-war art to those of the Tate (as it was still known, quaintly, in those distant days). It was also solid blue-chip stock, and was subsequently disposed of to bankroll the development of a very different collection. This was to be a speculative, venture capitalist’s project, with a much greater concentration on new and unfamiliar artists. In market terms, Saatchi turned his attention from the FTSE 100 to AIM-listed stocks, unlisted stocks and start-ups. Like many another venture capitalist, he had some notable successes – he bought Hirst, he bought Emin, he bought Lucas, all at the bottom of the market – and corrected his mistakes by selling. This, broadly speaking, is the policy he has stuck with.

The opening of “New Blood”, at the newish Saatchi Gallery in County Hall, might be said to complete the metamorphosis of the Saatchi Collection – now emphatically the collection of Charles Saatchi alone – into the complete opposite of what it once was. The gallery is labyrinthine and self-evidently converted from municipal use, the very antithesis of the modernist white cube. It is a place of dark corridors, of conference- and meeting-rooms done up in cheap-looking...

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