A star-studded launch fails to quell doubts over Saatchi gallery

The launch party will be an advertiser's dream. With a guest list topped by David Bowie, Alan Bennett, Jeremy Irons and Tracey Emin, tonight's celebration to mark the birth of the Saatchi Gallery is guaranteed the headlines its owner has made a career out of generating.

But as the gallery's collection of seminal works by Young British Artists was previewed yesterday, ahead of the its opening on Thursday, it remained clear that Charles Saatchi's ambitious venture is not receiving the unanimous acclaim that greeted his riverside rival, Tate Modern, when it opened three years ago.

In part, it is human nature being grudging. The nation appeared to will the success of Tate Modern after the Millennium Dome debacle.

Mr Saatchi, by contrast, is a multimillionaire advertising guru with a feted girlfriend (the TV chef Nigella Lawson), who helped persuade the country to vote for Margaret Thatcher ­ the woman who, of course, made his gallery's home in County Hall possible by abolishing the Greater London Council.

But the cavils cannot all be put down to sour grapes. Even Damien Hirst has dismissed the gallery as a "waste of time", because most of the work has been shown before.

Art critics, too, have voiced doubts. It has been said that County Hall, with its chambers and offices, is a very unpromising space for exhibitions. Its rabbit's warren of rooms, some so inhospitable that only one piece can be exhibited, is a world away from the open white spaces that Mr Saatchi has made his trademark.

Its listed building status and its miles of wood panelling and corridors presented problems for Mr Saatchi as he set out to showcase his unparalleled collection of Young British Artists.

Mr Saatchi has had to adopt some innovative hanging manoeuvres in the difficult space to do the artwork justice. Some paintings have had to be displayed on easels, others hang from the roof on ropes and shockingly modern pieces by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas have been given old, ornate frames.

A marble staircase leads to the most famous works ­ Damien Hirst's shark, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley portrait ­ which compete in the central rotunda.

In a juxtaposition of the old and the new, the visitor must march past a long list of County Hall soldiers killed in the First World War before they reach the shark or Emin's unmade bed.

"The building is a curator's nightmare," observed the Telegraph's Richard Dorment, while Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times found himself longing for the pure, clean spaces of Tate Modern. "If kitsch is the new cool, then it may take a few visits to come around to it," he said.

The Independent's Tom Lubbock has, perhaps, been the most damning. "The old GLC building is powerfully inhospitable. The curating is abominable, An extraordinary, historic flop," he wrote.

"With some exceptions, Saatchi art ­ bright and shiny, shitty and bloody, rude and jokey ­ is an adman's art: high impact, quick yield, attention-grabbing, short attention span. It often doesn't ask to be looked at more than once, and it has been exhaustively exposed. What should this gallery be ­ a mausoleum to the momentary?"

Yet Mr Saatchi ­ who may not even attend the launch party ­ evidently thought critics were likely to grasp his vision. News reporters were kept away while critics were given early admission. And, to be fair, some have revelled in the gallery. Even Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard's hard-to-please commentator, approved. "The now notorious exhibits that seemed so stark and startling in the white light and vast irregular spaces of the paint factory, now seem so homely, settled and comfortable," he said.

Mr Saatchi justified his decision for moving to the city centre from the smaller gallery on Boundary Road in the north-west London suburb of St John's Wood by saying: "I gave up Boundary Road because I got to the point where I no longer had to agonise about how to hang [the art]."

But the gains that a base on the South Bank will give toMr Saatchi are clear. Millions already visit the neighbouring London Eye. The potential number of visitors that the £8.50-a-head show could attract is enormous.

And everyone agrees that if YBAs is what you are after, Charles Saatchi found them and bought them. He created the market that he is now marketing to the masses.

Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, thinks the new gallery will introduce more people to the art. "It's an amazing space and I think it's going to get huge numbers of people," she said. "It will make people sit up and think about contemporary art in a new way. Hats off to Charles. He's investing a lot of money and time and effort."