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When I first started visiting London regularly, in the latter part of the 1990s, I used to get annoyed at the quantity of American art I would find in the galleries. Had I really travelled so many miles to see things I could have encountered so much more conveniently with a subway ride to SoHo? (Remember SoHo?)

 Now that I've lived in London for more than five years - long enough to be eligible for a British passport, should I care to apply for one - I look at shows of American art with a different kind of interest. It's a way of catching up. Things have changed quite a bit in the old homeland - in fact, when I left the United States, the word 'homeland' was not even in circulation, except on those rare occasions when it was necessary to translate the slightly creepy German word Heimat. The United States has changed politically, needless to say, and changed culturally as well. And as for the art scene ... I feel a little bit like Rip van Winkle when I pound the Chelsea pavement these days.

 From this side of the ocean, it's hard not to be shocked and awed by the unprecedented influx of cash into the contemporary art market; the 1980s seem little more than a low-key dress rehearsal for what's going on now. And then there's the mania for young artists, right out of their MFA thesis show if possible. This I find especially odd. Although there have always been artists who've made a big splash while still in their early twenties - from Frank Stella through Jean Michel Basquiat - they were the exceptions. The standard career model had those dreaded 'wilderness years' built in, the time spent painting houses or clerking at the art supply store before you finally emerged with your first show of work that probably had nothing to do with what you'd done as a student. For many, this hiatus has been abolished, and with it the last threads of what used to be the bohemianism of the art world.

What's interesting about all this, as observed from London, is how the New Yorkers have belatedly taken an idea that was already familiar here and pushed it so much further; for one of the main things that struck me as different when I arrived in London five and a half years ago was the attention paid to art school degree shows, which are widely covered in the popular press. I quickly realised that it was all down to the Saatchi Factor: because it was known that England's biggest collector avidly trolled the schools for new talent, it had become The Done Thing. But the craze for young artists never attained anything like the intensity it would generate in New York within a few years.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the article in full in the March 2007 issue of Art & Australia.