Newsnight Review discussed the new Saatchi Gallery.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON: Tom Paulin, is this a good idea or is Charles Saatchi flogging a dead shark?

TOM PAULIN: It's a great idea to have an enormous art gallery in the centre of London. It's a terrific idea. You go in and you get the dead shark, and you get a rotting cow's head and flies, and that kind of thing, I was going to say. You get in-yer-face narcissistic, terminally imaginatively dead art, and you get that portrait of Myra Hindley, which is called Myra, which softens the image of Hindley, which is a terrible act of impiety to the victims and a terrible distress for the families. That sort of fills it with a sense that here you are, in a great civic building, but you are actually looking into a void early in the 21st century. Is this all that it's capable of? Then there are some wonderful paintings, a brilliant one of a Spanish fascist, which is absolutely marvellous.

MARK LAWSON: People don't necessarily think of Saatchi as having that sort of thing. When we go into the middle of the Council chamber, all the headline pieces of modern art - the bed, the shark, Ron Mueck's giant mask. Does it show well altogether? I think it does.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: I found it exhilarating and iconic. I didn't feel I was looking into a 20th century void. I thought I was looking into a still bubbling crucible. Charles Saatchi is a modern-day Medici. He has brought this stuff in. He is a great showman. He is more than a recording angel. He has also dictated taste in the way he has bought artists and promoted them. He has stamped a generation. To see it there I find exciting.

MARK LAWSON: James Patterson, we are probably more familiar with this stuff. What did you make of it?

JAMES PATTERSON: have an inquisitive four-year-old. I asked Jack what was with all the questions. He said, "I want to know how the world works and how you see it. I think this is a great way to see how a lot of interesting people see the world.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: And he is four?

JAMES PATTERSON: You may not see it, but you see the way the mind works. Early on, Saatchi recognised a burning need, here in England, to throw mud at the establishment. That's sort of a continuing - whatever the establishment thought, whatever the establishment religion or politics, et cetera. It's very consistent that way.

MARK LAWSON: Also, the body and what happens to it is quite important in your books. This is what a lot of artists are getting at - decay and mortality. Did you respond to that?

JAMES PATTERSON: I can be grossed out, too. But I find it very provocative. At its best, it's a meeting of the minds. I found myself very stimulated. I was there for an hour-and-a-half. Unfortunately, I had to go and see Johnny and Ali G the same afternoon, so I had to leave. I would have been happy to stay for three hours.

MARK LAWSON: Jeanette, when we move out into the other corridors, we start to see lesser-known artists and works. Did you feel that it sustains once you get away from the very familiar work?

JEANETTE WINTERSON: Yes. You maintain the excitement of discovery. One of the ways the building works so well is these endless labyrinth of brave new world corridors. There is always something new to discover. You don't feel you are being directed in that art gallery/museum kind of way. It's a personal journey.

MARK LAWSON: Didn't you feel that, when you get to some of the more recent work, it's clear that they are producing a self-conscious kind of Brit art, Charles Saatchi art?

JEANETTE WINTERSON: That's the problem. Because of his enormous influence, people are thinking, "How can I buy work which he will buy and make me rich and famous." That's our culture and the world we live in. It's not Charles Saatchi's fault.

TOM PAULIN: This is the body that there is, and the body's mortal and ugly and decaying often.

MARK LAWSON: But all those things are true, aren't they?

TOM PAULIN: There is no, then, spiritual or imaginative dimension that runs against that, or with it.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: But there is. You thought that with the Ron Mueck.

JAMES PATTERSON: There are other exhibits you can go to for that. These are just parables of materialism. Wedded to consumption and materialism without any kind of spirituality.

MARK LAWSON: You can find what you want. Some people find spirituality in the Ron Mueck. He has an exhibition in the National Gallery as well.

TOM PAULIN: I like his work, but his work is, in a way, finding ways of saying, "This is all there is if you belong to an historical moment and a level of society where people are besotted with consumption, materialism and sexuality." That's all there is.

MARK LAWSON: You are suggesting at the beginning it was worthless. There are strong ideas here.

TOM PAULIN: What are the ideas?

MARK LAWSON: It's visual ideas.

TOM PAULIN: What it is, you see - it has this great phrase about the prurience of the optic nerve. It's how everything goes in seeing, but a particular kind of consuming, clinical seeing where you appropriate what you see and reduce it.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: One of the things I found exciting about it is that you are forced to look. These things demand attention. You have to look at ordinary objects in quite a different way instead of seeing them as something merely familiar and passive.

TOM PAULIN: I don't think the dead shark is an ordinary object.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: No, but when we go into fields and we look at a cow, and you look at the sliced cow, it's rather delicious in that...

TOM PAULIN: These are all forms of pornography.

JEANETTE WINTERSON: No. They are ways of seeing.