The overspill galleries at the back of the Royal Academy are a wonderful space to view this exhibition in – big, light and airy. In amongst the obligatory – and in this case, all very large-scale - abstract nonsense (pretty to look at but also pretty meaningless) there are some really interesting works of art. Many of the most successful artists have appropriated unlikely techniques to showcase some very serious issues.

I loved Jules De Balincourt’s work, which was the first thing we encountered in the lobby, and has been the most reproduced and commented on in reference to this exhibition (plus, he looks very cute in the catalogue). His intricate paintings use a simplistic faux-naïve technique to portray serious issues, mainly to do with liberal artists’ anger towards Bush’s tenure. I won’t comment much on his work as it has already been discussed widely, but I did particularly love People Who Play And The People Who Pay; I am a sucker for funny little people anyway. In this painting he renders the rich clients of a monolithic hotel as bloated pink blobs of grotesquely hyper real flesh – as if their excess is oozing out of their skin – whilst the ant-like workers look contrastingly smart and dignified in their cool starched white uniforms.

Saatchi clearly likes thickly-laid paint. Dana Schutz takes up the better part of a huge room with her grotesque works. As my mother commented: “good value, lots of paint.” Apparently my great uncle Howard (who taught me to paint watercolours when I was very little) used to say this about a particularly well covered painting that my grandparents possess. Her works are too crude and obvious in their meaning to me – shove it in your face American-style. Alongside her work is shown the equally nightmarish World Wall by Ryan Trecartin – like a kiddie’s playcentre gone mad, this huge piece is sprouting growths and tumours all over the place. In fact, the whole exhibition is positively awash with tumourous growths and unsightly bulges of flesh. Carter even uses great gobs of synthetic hair to create abstract paintings and Inka Essenhigh’s Shopping is utterly weird. Her surrealistic ladies mutate all over the counters of their habitat and become one with their purchases. Huma Bhabha’s Bin Bag Bulge is oddly compelling because it seems so human in shape and yet it has a strange tail, made of broken clay. I loved Jon Pylypchuk’s Hopefully, I Will Live Through This With A Little Bit Of Dignity, which is a tableaux constructed of what look like vomiting soldier gremlins, with scrawny tails and peg-legs. The centre piece is a big pile of mud. Wangechi Mutu’s collages mix weird body parts, but I liked her thickly applied black glitter semi-fros the most. Note – must find out how to do that on the magazine.

Lara Schnitger’s I Want Kids is another curiously unappealing-shaped sculpture – it’s meaning was probably a little too obvious and frankly , just not aesthetically considered enough for my liking. Next to this is Christoph Schmidberger’s Resist Me – That’s All I Need. (Another major feature is how the names of the artists on display emphasize the wide range of nationalities that make up America today.) His photorealistic nude is me, (was me, before I became a little more adult in my deportment, which is not saying much, but anyway) all youthful flesh and desperation.

Adam Cvijanovic also used a photoreal method (although he apparently does not work from photos) to produce an amazing modern triptych – Love Poem (10 Minutes After The End Of Gravity) which was made using Flashe and house paint on Tyvek (a type of portable plastic sheeting). I don’t understand the title, but his clever use of common products to produce an amazing swirling whirlwind of prefab houses – a typhoon where frozen chickens collide with cars and uprooted suburban blooms – is captivating. The constant bright blue of the sky emphasizes the calmness of this captured chaos beautifully. Other large-scale works are by Aleksandra Mir, who has used a team of assistants to construct vast felt tip pen map murals. They are highly decorative, as is the work of Mark Grotjahn, who’s pleasant abstracts remind me of the work of Turner nominee Tomas Abbas. In fact, I have realised that it is really very trendy in the art world right now to layer lots of paint over masking taped-off areas.

There isn’t that much on display to warrant the warnings that some work might offend. There is a small but beautifully executed painting called Penis by Ellen Altfest – which basically does what it says on the tin. As do the self-explanatory works Crackhead and Big White Cock by Beijing-born Terence Koh. Gerald Davis’ paintings are just downright creepy. Boy-Fight – with two curiously elongated children of the type that you might see in a comic book – depicts just that, complete with curiously swinging infantile penises. Also clearly influenced by comics, computer games and fantasy worlds, Matthew Monahan’s skeletons either become curly, like Tibetan decoration, or rhomboid, like armoured exoskeletons. In his world humans have become almost alien – we have mutated into something other. We now belong in the fantasy worlds that we have created. And who is Harriet (Last Portrait) by Matthew Day Jackson? Massive swirls of artificially bright wool, abalone and lazer-burnt wood create an alien work of majestic beauty. The message is: we are aliens, even to our hand-crafting selves.