Newspeak: British Art Now Part 1

About 11 rooms into 'Newspeak', I finally figured out what Saatchi's bran-tub of recent British art reminds me of: an art fair, albeit a pretty good and spaciously installed one. It lacks coherence, goes on forever while disabling one's ability to see clearly, and occasionally even clusters together artists from the same stable. Witness, for example, the Carl Freedman-centric 'blackness and coloured balls' room featuring Peter Peri's paintings and Fergal Stapleton's sculptural assemblages, while elsewhere there's a Herald St artist around every corner.

Not that even the slickest curation - and here it's superficial and formalist - could easily impose a totalising order onto these 29 artists' practices. Continuities arise in fleeting cells: the melancholy art-historical gaming of Sigrid Holmwood's irradiated, DayGlo-splashed versions of Nordic nineteenth-century painting and Ged Quinn's workmanlike Arcadias, mechanistically dotted with modern anachronisms; the heterogeneous sculptural assemblage style that binds Steven Claydon and Matthew Darbyshire.

One wonders if this isn't the '80s revival operating on the largest cultural scale: pluralism rediscovered, even though it never went away. The exhibition's title is intended as an inverted reference to the Soviet-esque official language in '1984 '- whereas Orwell's invented lexicon 'gets smaller every year', the art in 'Newspeak' reflects proliferating polyphony. It's mildly extraordinary that this is being held up as news, rather than the business-as-usual of art since, well, about 1984. But there you go: there's got to be a hook.

In terms of quality, though, this is one of the better shows to have been mounted at Duke of York's HQ, even if it is mostly pretty familiar. A confrontational style cuts through the miasma of practices, as evidenced by Lynette Yiadom Boakye's slippery, intimidating fictional portraits of hybrid identities and Clunie Reid's righteously tetchy installations prowling around gender roles and representation: sprawls of toilet graffiti, appropriated and scrawled-over media images and snapshots, and fragmented textual blurts (eg 'She gets even happier!').

Karla Black's suspended and dropped sculptures made from sugar paper and liquid-dribbled plastic look better here than they have virtually anywhere. And the nerd-art sidebar of trompe l'oeil sculpture and painting by Rupert Norfolk and William Daniels is a nice palate cleanser, even if Norfolk should be paying royalties to Vija Celmins for his construction of a low wall made from symmetrically carved stones.

And yet, for all its virtues on the micro scale, 'Newspeak' feels leached of impetus as a whole: shooting off in all directions, it has little forward propulsion, and a fair amount of it feels revved-up but second-hand (outside of various punky gestures and wearily rococo ornamentation of figures, it's amusing to think that nobody mentioned Brian Eno's generative music experiments to Saatchi when he laid down cash for John Wynne's randomised plink-plonk sound installation featuring a heap of speakers). Why does 'Newspeak' exist? Because artists keep making art and collectors, who have their reasons, keep buying it. Look at the art on a case-by-case basis and it's frequently clever, thoughtful stuff. Bring it all together, and what might be spun as fecund diversity can look atomised and aimless.