BritArt's big day out

Some came to praise BritArt. Some came hoping to see it buried. Some came to buy; others just to gawp. Yesterday, in a warehouse next to Smithfield Market, London, British contemporary art had its biggest test. It had to be a warehouse as no Christie's showroom could accommodate Jake & Dinos Chapman's towering fibreglass sculpture of Professor Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair tottering on the edge of a cliff.

And with Damien Hirst's prime exhibit consisting of dozens of jars of internal organs of cattle, where better to sell it than next to the country's most famous meat market?

But those who climbed the corrugated iron staircases into the third floor of the incongruously makeshift saleroom yesterday were not bothered about the surroundings. Dealers, collectors, gallery directors, art students and anyone desirous of showing off at a dinner party needed the answer to the key question the afternoon would unlock: could the "Sensation" crowd of Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Jake & Dinos Chapman et al cut the mustard any more?

Certainly, they could get exhibitions, Venice Biennale pavilions and critical acclaim. The art world establishment had taken the media darlings of the Brit Pack to its embrace and every cutting-edge space in the country has been theirs throughout the Nineties.

But did anyone want to buy them? Were Hirst's internal organs of cattle and Whiteread's sculpted space around a kitchen sink to be seen as eternal art, provoking philosophical questions and increasing in value each year, or as mere ephemera, the emblems of a faddish, over-hyped decade of student art now to be exposed as the emperor's new clothes?

The man taking the risk, not just for himself but for the entire art world and the auction houses, was Charles Saatchi, the collector and advertising agency co-founder, who had almost single-handedly discovered the Hirst generation. It was his pounds 70m collection which was used for "Sensation" last year at the Royal Academy. Now he was offloading 5 per cent of it, 130 works by 97 artists, with the proceeds going towards bursaries for art students and funds for art colleges.

The warehouse was a sea of black, clearly the chosen Brit Pack colour. Even the collectors who stepped out of Rolls-Royces and Mercedes in the car park, wearing dark glasses in the grey drizzle to show this was the cutting edge, disdained colour as a tribute to the generation of artists who took art out of the gallery and into the warehouses and student shows.

Leaning against one of the tall, white pillars under the industrial tiling were some of the Young British Artists themselves. Sue Webster and Tim Noble were not up for auction on this occasion, but they were curious. "We want to know what this work is worth," they said. Therein their financial security lay.

"We don't want to be part of a fashion," said Miss Webster, "as fashion always goes out of fashion." She had, at least, mastered the Saatchi soundbite.

In front of them sat the experienced art buyer Frank Cohen, the owner of an extensive collection that includes Damien Hirst. He said it remained difficult to determine the worth of work when the artists were still young and fresh. He said he had his eyes on Ron Mueck's Big Baby. But when the bidding started and rapidly rose, his interest seemed to wane.

The only splat of colour at the auction was provided by Angus Rankine, sporting a bright orange coat and yellow tie. Not surprisingly, he turned out to be the owner of a Hirst spot painting. The managing director of a communications company, he said he was not there to buy but to study the going rates. "I enjoy trying to follow the tracks of Charles Saatchi."

One man who did eventually buy was the investment manager Roddy Campbell, who bought a Walter Niedermayr snow-splattered canvas for pounds 3,000. His juices flowing, the first-time bidder said: "I cannot describe what making a bid is like. I feel quite sweaty and full of adrenalin now. It's like having a severe coffee shake."

Amid the largely young faces Mr Campbell was a typical member of the Brit Pack fan club - wearing a long, dark trenchcoat and dark-rimmed glasses. Every so often he sought advice from his wife via mobile phone. He looked more like a trainspotter than an art buyer. But perhaps this is the new trainspotting.

As Mueck's Big Baby came up, one art student said in a loud stage whisper: "Save your money, it's only wax." He was hushed up. The artists are allowed to make jokes with their installations. The buyers are not.

The auctioneer mounted the wooden podium, flanked in startling contrast by the saleroom's bright red cloths, Richard Billingham's photographs of outsize women and Mueck's two-foot-high, oversized, polyester resin sculpture of a boy. The whole room went quiet. Except a genuine baby, squealing in its art-buying mother's arms, perhaps terrified by Mueck's version of itself staring wide-eyed and naked.

It might have been more terrified had its mother turned its face towards the Christie's screen. On it flashed up the first major lot - to non-art lovers, what seemed to be a page from the daily Sport featuring seven nudes. How little non-art lovers know. This was by one of the leaders of the Brit Pack, Sarah Lucas, and complete with title - Seven Up - and official description - "photocopy on paper, executed in 1991" - this was radical contemporary art. Don't believe me; read the catalogue: "She's a code-breaker and a ball-buster, a saboteur and a spy. Elegantly in your face, Lucas is a smutty, salt-of-the-earth lout whose unequivocal work is raw and loud and startling."

Who could resist that? Very few, it rapidly became evident. The bids resounded in the hall. "Last chance, Sir, you've come all the way to Clerkenwell," the auctioneer said to a bidder he may have recognised from the more sedate saleroom in St James's. The telephones started going ballistic. In a few moments the pounds 7,000 top estimate was broken and more than doubled as The Sport's inside page, with a touch of code-breaking and ball-busting, fetched pounds 14,500.

Next up was Jenny Saville's Prop, an oil painting of a hugely fat woman, to prove Saville's philosophy that male fantasies must be challenged and big can be beautiful.

The bigger challenge was whether Saville herself could sell. She had never sold outside the Saatchi collection. Had his championing of the 28-year-old artist paid dividends? It had. The top estimate was pounds 15,000. It sold for pounds 51,000. A few cognoscenti observed that she had a show soon at the Gogosian Gallery in New York. That, the sages mused, would have helped the price.

But no time to chat. The two big tests of the Brit Pack, of Charles Saatchi's influence and of the market, had arrived. First came Untitled [Square Sink] by Rachel Whiteread, a Turner Prize winner and Britain's representative at the last Venice Biennale. A picture of the "negative cast" of the sink came up on the screen. "It's the Rachel Whiteread," one woman whispered to her neighbour, somehow a more awe-inspired whisper than "It's the kitchen sink". The auctioneer turned straight to the bank of telephones. "The bidding is between Henry and Laura," he said, signalling what must have been two Christie's employees rather than collectors, given away by their lack of black clothing.

Whiteread's negative sink, estimated to sell for pounds 50,000, fetched pounds 133,500. It was another telephone bid that took Damien Hirst's spot painting for pounds 110,000. The faith in the Brit Pack had held. At a recent sale a Hirst spot painting failed to reach its estimate. That was a blip. The pounds 122,500 was more than four times the estimate.

Though much higher than their estimates, the prices were still relatively economical in terms of saleroom masterpieces. BritArt is affordable, and there was considerable speculation that some of the telephone bidders might have been connected with the Tate, which has a new international gallery of modern art at Bankside to furnish.

What a feast of the avant-garde. But the spectre at the feast was Charles Saatchi. In one afternoon he had offloaded 5 per cent of his collection, proved the marketability of young British artists and raised more than pounds 1m for art students and art colleges.

And he was nowhere to be seen. The consensus in the room was that he was out "shopping", scouring the colleges for the next generation of Hirsts and Whitereads so that he could make their names, shock some more, earn some more, then offload them all in a good cause, naturally.

Additional reporting by Anne-Celine Jaeger