The Saatchi effect

It's the call that art students fantasise about. When Ian Monroe's mobile phone rang one day eight months ago, he assumed it was just a friend trying to drag him out to the pub. In fact it was Charles Saatchi, informing him that he'd like to buy a large work from his MA degree show at Goldsmiths. There was none of the take-it-or-leave-it haggling rumoured to precede his purchases, and Monroe didn't even meet him back then - he remained a disembodied, Wizard Of Oz-like voice down the end of the line.

To be bought by Charles Saatchi is in itself not so extraordinary - the ad-man-turned-Brit-Art patron buys as insatiably as Imelda Marcos shops for stilettos, adding another piece to his 2,500-strong collection every fortnight or so, according to his spokesman, William Miller. As a newly minted graduate, fresh from the cradle of Brit Art, not to mention the scene-savvy son of a painter and director of one of Washington's Smithsonian Museums, Monroe was well aware of this. He kept his head down and began studiohunting, focused solely on making 'the art support the art' - after having splashed out on a new pair of trainers, that is.

But Monroe's story was about to get better still, because in February Saatchi paid a visit to his Whitechapel studio to tell him that 'Canyon Recreated', his epically scaled collage of speakers stacked like skyscrapers, would be hanging in the new County Hall gallery, one of notably few pieces by emerging artists.

Monroe grew up outside Washington DC and as the only child of arty parents, was barely conscious of choosing his direction in life. 'I've been drawing since I was a little kid and was all into making tree forts and stuff, so I just kind of kept going - I can't imagine doing anything else.' After a BA in sculpture, he hit the road and lived in his truck for a year, before building boats and working in a series of galleries and museums in New York and LA to repay his college loan. Now 30, he can rattle off a colourful CV. 'I've done just about every job you can do as an artist - I can weld, I can bolt paintings to the walls, I can catalogue - you do what you can and you try to keep your eye on your studio the whole time.'

His decision to come to Britain for his MA was partly financial (it's cheaper here), and he had also by then met his British-Danish wife, a fellow artist - but above all he needed to 'shake things up'. To stay in the States, he explains, would have been too easy.

In person, Monroe is wholesome and squeaky-clean in jeans, shirt and jacket as crisp as the Cubist-inspired lines of his work. Posing for his photograph, he jokingly reminds himself not to slouch. But for all his unflappable eloquence and hands-on cool, the whole Saatchi experience is clearly tinged with unreality for him. As we stroll down the hallowed corridors of County Hall, all mottled marble and warm, syrupy-hued wood, he momentarily forgets the way to the Boiler Room, where his work is hanging.

The Saatchi Gallery long ago outgrew its Boundary Road birthplace, but the move to County Hall is about much more than space. In location it may be closest to Tate Modern, but it is the National Gallery that Charles Saatchi has in his sights. As the home of the former GLC, the building retains a certain radical street cred, while its undeniably gracious interior adds 'authority', as William Miller puts it. Rosters of previous GLC chairmen now flank an exuberant neon tattoo entitled 'Toxic Schizophrenia', while the works that so embody Brit Art consort in the circular Conference Hall. Damien Hirst's shark, Tracey Emin's bed, Chris Ofili's Madonna, each in its own alcove along with works by Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk and the Chapman brothers. Grayson Perry vases gleam beside pillars, and Ron Mueck's angel peers pensively down at passers-by.

The official line is that this is a radical move, locating one of the most cutting-edge contemporary art collections amid the ultra-traditional interior and Edwardian architecture of such an impressive municipal building, but dissenters have been quick to dismiss the venture as a museum to the Nineties, and there is more than a whiff of the mausoleum: all the clocks here are stopped, and Saatchi's crew have been careful to preserve a few cracks on the ceiling - 'for atmosphere', as Miller explains. The Boiler Room is the exception to this interior design scheme, a pristine white space in which Saatchi plans to rotate recent acquisitions by new artists.

The Saatchi sale will have had a significant impact on Monroe's prices, but just as he can make a reputation by buying work, so he can wreck it by selling. Monroe is the first to acknowledge that a career can only be steered so far, but he is already wrapping up his 'speaker series' and plotting fresh work for a solo show at his gallery, Hammer Sidi, later on this year.

As a rule, mentioning Charles Saatchi's name has an odd effect on artists, and Monroe is quick to duck out of commenting - he wasn't here in the Nineties and, as an American, he experienced the Brit Art explosion secondhand, through the US media. But when I ask if there is an artist from Saatchi's stable whose work he especially admires, his answer is telling despite its evasiveness. 'They all seem so familiar, you know it so well, but it's such a body of work it's difficult to separate them.' But perhaps Monroe's own work has more to say about this audacious new enterprise than Charles Saatchi would care to realise. Its themes? Power and excess.