Shark? Seen it. Dung? It’s been done.

The shark is back, but the shock has gone.

The new Saatchi Gallery, which opens to the public today, features the paintings, sculptures and installations that for 10 years made BritArt a byword for cutting-edge creativity, while delighting and disgusting audiences throughout the world.

Many of the most notorious works are here: Damien Hirst’s pickled sheep and preserved shark, Tracey Emin’s dirty unmade bed, Marc Quinn’s head of frozen blood and Chris Ofili’s elephant dung portrait of the Virgin Mary.

In Hirst’s view, however, the new Saatchi Gallery is a “waste of time.”

“I think it is pointless,” Hirst recently told Time Out magazine. “Most of the work has been shown two or three times already.”

Indeed, parts of the Saatchi collection are like Hirst’s increasingly wrinkled shark in formaldehyde: something once living and dynamic that is now being preserved artificially, and not entirely successfully.

The heavy wood panels and black columns of the gallery’s home -- the Edwardian-era County Hall by the Thames -- add to the mausoleum effect.

The works turned modern art into mainstream news in Britain, making such artists as Hirst and Emin almost as recognizable as pop stars during the 1990s.

The decision to permanently display the best-known pieces from his collection is a big departure for gallery owner Charles Saatchi.

A publicity-shy multimillionaire and advertising mogul, Saatchi formerly concentrated on buying only the very newest art, often purchased in bulk from unknowns straight out of art school. He would show the art in his minimalist north London gallery, then sell much of it.

Some art-world observers have speculated that Saatchi’s new gallery seeks to rival the Tate Modern, the huge and highly successful contemporary art center that opened in 2000 in a former power plant downstream from County Hall.

According to spokesman William Miller, Saatchi believes his gallery and the Tate Modern can be complementary.