I’ve just come back from a few days in New York. It is a city of distinct districts, Little Italy, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the Bowery. When I was last there ten years ago the commercial art gallery district was SoHo. Now they are concentrated in a neat rectangle of Chelsea between 20th and 27th Street and 10th and 11th Avenue. The question I first asked any art world person I met was how had the New York gallery scene changed in the last decade, apart from geographically. The word that came up most frequently was “corporate”.

This is surprising when one first encounters Chelsea. It is an area of scruffy storage facilities, car repair shops and hydraulically stacked parking lots. Few of the 150 or so dealers in the area make a play for the casual passer-by. The glossy voids of the most powerful art dealers on the planet are so discreet that it’s very easy to walk past them if you don’t know what you are looking for. The few dozen major players occupy vast ground-floor units that could be untenanted car showrooms. The grey metal and frosted glass fascias are as unbranded as a Muji filing cabinet.

The description “corporate” becomes more appropriate on entering. The architecture of the contemporary-art space seems to have reached a consensus. No room for quirky bohemia here. Minimalist lux is the house style. Black-clad staff can be glimpsed through tall doorways gliding about neat offices; calmness screams from every perfect right-angle. The concrete floors are polished so that one can see the paintings reflected in them. A tasteful portion of the building’s original industrial architecture – an old skylight, a weathered wooden beam – is occasionally allowed to puncture the white envelope. The commercial art gallery strives to seem expensively invisible.

Some people expressed a nostalgia for the lively creative amateurism of the past but I think the art can be just as exciting. It’s just that the system has grown around it like the white bubble in the TV show The Prisoner.

New York is still where artists can make big money. The London scene has grown amazingly but the US has the lion’s share of the serious collectors. Here artists are encouraged to up the ante; commercial galleries are bigger than some museums.

The idea of there being such a thing as a trend, let alone a movement, in modern art feels a bit ridiculous nowadays but I did notice a lot less photography and video than in the past. Collectors are notoriously frightened of any art with a plug. It was refreshing to see artists using basic materials such as clay and the humble pencil. The Gladstone Gallery had a show called Makers and Modellers that features the ceramic efforts of 29 contemporary artists. I thought the theme material of the show curiously levelled the artists, mainly through their shared ineptitude. Some, such as Thomas Schütte, seemed more comfortable with the medium. I wonder if they would have staged a show of paintings by ceramicists.

Ugo Rondinone’s show made me laugh out loud on entering the Matthew Marks gallery. The 12 huge cartoon heads, 9ft (2.7m) high, look at first glance to be made of wet clay but the sculptures are in fact painted cast aluminium. The effect is like wandering through a childlike version of Easter Island.

Ceramic crops up again in the beautifully coloured sculptures by Paul Noble at Gagosian. The table-top works are based on gongshi or scholars’ rocks. Like the Chinese originals Noble’s versions sit on wooden bases exquisitely carved so that the hard sculptures seem to nestle into them. His gongshi are based on the sculptures of Henry Moore, an artist whose work has cropped up in Noble’s large-scale pencil drawings from the beginning. One drawing called Monument Monument is a carefully rendered wall made up entirely of Moore’s forms.

Noble was not the only Brit making a good showing in Chelsea, Chris Ofili had just opened a large show at David Zwirner called Devil’s Pie. This is Ofili’s first show in New York since the huge controversy sparked by his painting The Holy Virgin Mary when Sensation came to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Ofili, now based in Trinidad, has forsaken the glitter, shiny resin patterns and, of course, the elephant dung for which he became famous. But he keeps the Christian subject matter with paintings on the theme of Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, as well as sculptures of dark bronze Angel Gabriels copulating with polished virgins, and a suite of etchings of Judas kissing Christ.

Another Turner Prize-winner is showing at PaceWildenstein. Keith Tyson’s epic installation Large Field Array, named after a field of radio telescopes in New Mexico designed to focus on one spot in the universe from multiple viewpoints. Two hundred and twenty sculptures based on a 2ft cube and arranged in rows on the floor and walls are a huge interconnected “experimental lens for viewing some of the fundamental forces that make up reality”.

Each sculpture is realised to a high standard of finish and detail. The piece must have cost a fortune in model-maker’s wages. There is a 3-D rendition of an image from a Bosch painting, A bubbling mud pit, a giant Fabergé egg, a working lightning machine, a cubic snowman, a huge mug emblazoned with the cast of Friends. My mind boggled. If unused thoughts had to be kept stacked in a warehouse this is what it would look like. Great stuff.

Trolling round the gallery district on a Saturday afternoon is now a New York institution. Having them all so close together is easy for the visitor and good for business. It’s a shame that London has never quite managed this. Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, compared Chelsea gallery-going to grubbing for cheese in a maze like a laboratory rat.

I was pleased to find a nice bit of British Stilton.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette