Whenever he has got into bed with them, notably the Tate and Whitechapel galleries, critics reckoned he was using museum prestige to drive up prices. The late Bryan Robertson, who worked for the Whitechapel Art Gallery, called him a "cold speculator". I find it hilarious."Some of the discomfort arises from the idea that his is a private-sector museum, doing the public sector's job. Saatchi is constructing an all-encompassing, art world apparatus.

Now SaatchiWorld is even going to have its own prize, so he can reward his own collection. "But remember that the artists have made the work he owns, and then he folds them into his whole apparatus and makes it all about him. "Then he can bequeath the work that doesn't increase in value so as to gain a veneer of altruism."The myth of Saatchi, says Walker, is that of a "self-made man". "From the classic Marxist perspective, Saatchi exploits the labour power of his workers to make a fortune, and then exploits that fortune to manipulate culture," he says. Indeed, Saatchi's presence has disquieted, even confused the art world – the critic Matthew Collings has said that "nobody can ever quite sum up what the problem is".Some have not forgiven him for the "Labour isn't working" campaign, notably the left-leaning arts bureaucrats whose budgets were cut by the Iron Lady. It has been swelling for years, and there has long been art-world criticism about the way he buys and sells, but as the only major buyer in the UK, he has been begrudgingly accepted. Perhaps the worst indictment comes from Damien Hirst, whose work heralds the museum, but who has dissociated himself from the project as "pointless" and "a waste of time".The museum has crystallised the Saatchi backlash.

The poverty of Ralph Knott's Edwardian municipal backdrop, and the questionable canonising of a moment in British art have also arisen. The Saatchi Museum has been ridiculed as a vulgar vanity project, and labelled "risible", "a curator's nightmare", an "extraordinary, historic flop", and most notably, a "mausoleum". But Walker's construction is tame compared to some of the other counterblasts. The other, two miles away on the South Bank, was the ticket-only f? for Thatcher's adman Charles Saatchi in County Hall, a building available only because of Maggie's abrupt axeing of the Greater London Council in 1986, and now host to "SaatchiWorld". Actually, that is not the real name of the Saatchi Museum but a pejorative sobriquet coined by the art historian John A Walker, co-author with Rita Hatton of a book about Saatchi called Supercollector, so as to liken it to the "parallel reality found at DisneyWorld".Ouch. One was the "Thatcher" exhibition at the Blue Gallery in Clerkenwell, central London.