There's always a mild surprise in coming face to face with something or someone whose image you know better as just that: an image. Both Tony Blair and Ian Hislop are taller than they seem on the telly, Patrick Moore smells vaguely of aniseed, Prince Edward is entirely - and terribly few people realise this - made of Jus-Rol pastry dough.
The thing about every one of the exhibits for the opening show at the new Saatchi gallery, if you are a contemporary art virgin and seeing them the Þrst time, is the sudden discovery of an extra dimension. It's as simple and as surprising as hopping on the bus one day and being asked which year you'd like to travel to. You think you know the exhibits, but you only really 'know' them in two dimensions, the ones which exist on page Þve of the Daily Mail, along with a snitty commentary implying that 'anyone could have done that'.
I couldn't have done them. You couldn't have done them. (Actually, that's a lie: I could have done Sarah Lucas's mattress, in roughly the time it takes to tell a good dirty joke.) But the sheer scale, the craftsmanship, the colours, the physicality, the fact that they actually exist in three dimensions is what will mildly shock and delight us virgins. We have been reared during the media-savvy years that were responsible for what you might call the Death of the Primary Source - the proliferation of so much comment that we feel we can happily discuss the latest Tarantino, or Booker nominee, or art sensation, without having actually watched it, or read it, or sat on its mattress - and it is good for us to Þnally get out and see the real thing.
There is some terrible beauty here, and the chance to wonder, because seeing the pieces in real life does makes you think serious, decent questions about what a horrendous amount of work went into them, and therefore why it did - rather than just the little questions like how much it cost and isn't Tracey a dirty little girl.
The only mild disappointment for me, apart from not being allowed to switch off Marc Quinn's head of frozen blood (Just for a second? Just to tell people I had?) was the realisation that Damien Hirst had called his cows and sharks and things not, simply, 'Cow' and 'Shark' (or even, say, 'Moo!' and 'Chomp!') but The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (that's the shark, obviously) and Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything.
My personal highlights were Marcus Harvey's brave Myra, and Ron Mueck's fantastic and beautifully detailed Mask (which by the same token should surely more rightly be called 'The Guilty Sadness Brought On By Contemplating Massive Nostril Hairs while Quietly Plucking Your Own'). And it'll be interesting to see, on return visits, if Tracey's most famous exhibit undergoes subtle changes, as the press of what I suspect will be the biggest crowds wreaks a slow tidal change on the shingle of her bed.
For I will be back, and not just because of the simple joy of a Þne new gallery beside a Þne old river. That's the thing about losing your virginity. Once you lose it, you can't wait to get back between the sheets.
A handy YBA glossary
Anti-anti-art - rallying cry of the Stuckists, a loose-knit group of (mostly) Þgurative artists originally centred around Tracey Emin's former boyfriend Billy Childish, who oppose 'anything claiming to be art that incorporates dead animals or beds'.
Neophiliac - a term used self-descriptively by Charles Saatchi in a fax exchange with the writer Gordon Burn; meaning a lover, or 'gorger', of the 'briefly new'.
The Serota tendency - coined by Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell to describe the contemporary art establishment as embodied by Tate supremo Sir Nicholas Serota.
Shoreditch (twat) - district inhabited by more artists per square mile than anywhere else in Europe and scene of riotous YBA partying throughout the Nineties; its residents and clublife now recorded for posterity in evocatively titled fanzine Shoreditch Twat.