I was wrong, Charles – you have done us all a service

He gave us fried eggs, a half-­consumed kebab, fruit, vegetables and an upturned bucket as male and female organs, with every protrusion and aperture of the human body on a merry-go-round of misplacement; he gave us the dull interminable ordinariness of daily life in a provincial council house and contrasted it with gaping wounds and frozen blood. As photographs, mutilated window dressers' models and hyper-realistic fibreglass figures fit for Madame Tussauds, all these were presented as art and, like Louis XIV, Saatchi sat back and let happen the predictable deluge of abuse.

Many said he welcomed it, even that he engineered it, for every bishop and MP who questioned the morality of this art, every newspaper columnist who accused him of being a profiteering dealer, gave him free publicity that no advertisement could match, and Sensation established him a kingmaker at least the equal of Serota and the Tate in the contemporary art world. Could Damien Hirst, on the brink of the credit crunch, have emptied his studio for a hundred million pounds had not Saatchi played Svengali to his Trilby a decade earlier?

Most ordinary mortals question Saatchi's motives. Some damn him for buying in bulk and then ruining reputations by selling in bulk; others damn him for his showmanship, for his being the Barnum and Bailey of our day with freaks and aberrations. A couple of London critics of small reputation have scrambled onto his bandwagon and written sycophantic books; others, sceptical at first, have surrendered to the power of his patronage; a few, a very few, have remained obstinately unconverted and have continued to attend his many exhibitions driven only by a sense of dutiful curiosity.

It was at two of these exhibitions — by German artists who have come to the fore since the unification of Germany in 1989, and of American art produced in the first five years of this century — that hostile critics began to realise that Saatchi has, ever since he opened his successive collections to the public in March 1985, been performing an important and revealing service neglected by the Tate — that is showing us Art Now.

In his gallery — now in its third, most handsome and accessible incarnation in the old Duke of York's Barracks in Chelsea — this purpose has been even clearer, for in only nine months of activity there he has opened three true blockbusters (that is really big) devoted to current Chinese art, art from the Middle East, and now new Abstract American Art, opening tomorrow. Without these shows we could have little idea of how art is developing in other parts of the world, for under Serota, though he has given us retrospectives of a handful of major national and international figures, Tate Modern has attempted nothing encyclopaedic.

Perhaps, as one man's choice, encyclopaedic is not the word for Saatchi's shows; perhaps they are random and pragmatic, but they are here and they have offered us some understanding that even though this period of rapid communication has led to extreme internationalism, there are still, occasionally, significant national distinctions. His minions speak and write the incomprehensible jargon of contemporary art, but I fancy that the man himself does not believe a word of it and that it is employed to make the pseuds and frauds feel comfortable. I fancy too that he does not particularly like much of what he shows us, but he shows it because it exists, is representative of one current mode or another and should not be omitted. I fancy that in moments of contemplation he is as sceptical as any man still sane.

Having long been among the most doubting of Saatchi's critics, the most suspicious of his motives, the most repelled, revulsed and bored by the great bulk of what he has shown us, I could now argue that at great cost to himself he has performed a wily and subversive service in undermining contemporary art right round the globe — and I'd be greatly amused were this to prove true. But that is not what I believe. Instead, I must argue that without assistance from any public funds (least of all from the constipated Arts Council), he has single-handedly taken over one prime and vital duty of Tate Modern — to keep us abreast of contemporary art elsewhere.

I can think of no earlier collector of then contemporary art — not even Henry Tate himself, not even Samuel Courtauld — who has done so much to achieve this end, and I believe it to be time that Saatchi's energy and generosity should be given serious recognition by the state. His brother was made a life peer for his services to Mrs Thatcher and her party. Melvyn Bragg was made Baron of Wigton for boring us to tears with his bland enthusiasms in the South Bank Show. Have I to look in vain for Charles Saatchi in this summer's Honours List?