Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed will be remembered forever. So too, perhaps, will Marc Quinn’s self-portrait of his head filled with his own frozen blood, although decomposing plasma and unreli- able refrigeration may mean that memories will be all that remain of his masterpiece.
Marcus Harvey’s Myra, a gigantic portrait of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, may also enter the canon. Harvey’s work reproduces the infamous 1965 Daily Mirror photograph of Hindley using imprints of a child’s hand. At its first public showing at the Royal Academy in 1997, Myra was vandalised twice on the first day and subsequently four Royal Academicians resigned in protest—sure evidence that Harvey was on to something.
All four works have become synonymous with BritArt—that noisy, febrile, promising, chaotic, brilliant movement that was as much to do with the history of public relations as it was the history of art—which is the subject of a new book by Elizabeth Fullerton: Artrage! The Story of the BritArt Revolution.
If enduring memory and the ability to create strong public reactions are a measure of quality, then the Young British Artists bear comparison with national treasures such as JMW Turner and John Constable and the BritArt movement with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. By the same tests, it exceeds the achievements of Joshua Reynolds or the Camden Town School. But BritArt could also be infantile and unrewarding. And now, it seems, it is exhausted.
Other artists were involved in the movement—many technically better than Hirst, whose talent was for pranks, postures and publicity. In these fields, he’s a genius. But it was his satanic drive, craving for fame, managerial authority, preoccupation with mortality (his name is an anagram of “Is Mr Death In?” he once cheerfully explained) and his love of money, that fuelled the high-speed motor driving the BritArt machine.
While Hirst is not everyone’s idea of a great artist, his astonishing career speaks volubly of what art has become today. And he knows it. By confronting viewers with experiences calculated to be tastelessly shocking, Hirst played—very successfully—with our idea of what art does. He moves you to irritation or dismay or disgust, if rarely to exaltation or delight. But ignore Hirst, you cannot.
He also has an exceptionally keen business sense. Through his careful cultivation of influential curators and collectors, Hirst made real what a character sceptical of the art-world in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) described as “a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid.” Maybe art was always such a thing. In any case, BritArt is as much a topic for a business school case study as an art appreciation class.
In his 1982 book Art Worlds, the sociologist Howard S Becker explained how an artistic subculture worked: “a network of people whose cooperative activity organised via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of artworks that the art-world is noted for.” Which, to translate, means: “It’s art because we say it is.” Hirst and his peers drank deep from this Duchampian spring.
The difference was that Marcel Duchamp never made any money. The Sunday Times Rich List calculates Hirst is worth £215m. Hirst’s works confirm Andy Warhol’s belief that the most beautiful thing in the world is making money. As an exercise in wealth creation, BritArt was far more successful than most start-ups of its era.
Art is one thing and the art-world is another. Historically, the art-world emerged when painting and sculpture were losing their religious or social purpose. In 1760, Colnaghi became the first commercial art gallery. Other great dealers such as Ambroise Vollard and Joseph Duveen, for example, followed. They did not just enter the market, they created markets. “Isms” were invented and dutifully recorded by the new art historians. And when in the mid-20th century design and pop culture usurped painting and sculpture in providing collectively understood images of yearning and desire, so the art-world became more insular and self-referential, even as it sought publicity.
BritArt is primarily an art-world phenomenon rather than an artistic one. Recently, the art-world has been enlarged with injections of global money from itinerant collectors who see in art the ultimate luxury—a fast-appreciating financial asset as well as a portable and tax-efficient status symbol. These collectors are serviced by tribes of art consultants, freelance curators, gallerists and brokers who attend the global conga-line of art-world whirlpools in Basel, Miami, Hong Kong and Frieze in London. As Tom Wolfe recently remarked, there are few things more absurd than seeing billionaires in shorts and Hawaiian shirts breaking into a run as they open the fair’s doors at the Miami Beach Convention Centre. Robert Hughes called it all a “cultural obscenity.” Maybe he was right, but this is our context.
BritArt has clear historical start and end dates. It began in 1988 when, as a student, Hirst organised a clever group exhibition called Freeze in a disused public building in London’s Docklands. Reputations were established even before graduation. By 2008, when Hirst sold his collection at Sotheby’s for £111m, BritArt was over. From the last years of Margaret Thatcher’s government to the financial crash, the movement was bookended by money—perhaps best symbolised by Hirst’s For the Love of God, a diamond-encrusted skull from 2007 that cost £50m to make. With a characteristic mixture of luck and perspicacity, the Hirst sale occurred just hours before Lehman Brothers collapsed.
A motley crew of contemporary art-world figures supported Hirst. There was Norman Rosenthal, a rebarbative brain who became the Royal Academy’s exhibitions director. His 1997 exhibition, Sensation, which featured Hirst’s shark, as well as Myra, hijacked a sleepy Academy. Then there was Nicholas Serota, a steely art-world politician who as director built the Tate into a franchise that now resembles Disney. It was Serota who redirected the once worthy Turner Prize towards younger artists, setting it on a path to silliness from which its reputation may never be fully retrieved.
As a contrast in style, the Serpentine Gallery’s Julia Peyton-Jones, a demure presence, presided over exhibitions and events that achieved what had once been thought unlikely: making extremely advanced and often rather bad international art and architecture extremely popular.
And with his hands all over the controls of the BritArt machine was Charles Saatchi, a possessed, enigmatic, cussed adman who made reputations, made markets and made money. At his gallery in St John’s Wood, Saatchi anointed the chosen ones. He commissioned Hirst’s shark in 1991, and sold it to Wall Street predator Steve Cohen in 2004. (Surely a metaphor for something?) In the same year, his interest waning, Saatchi claimed to have offered Serota’s Tate his entire collection, a gesture that combined commercial opportunism with cultural mischief. The deal never happened and the two fell out. Instead, Saatchi moved into the Duke of York’s and built a gallery in Chelsea.
Lastly, there was Michael Craig-Martin, the softly spoken but insistent tutor at Goldsmiths, an admired artist in his own right, who was a generous mentor to Hirst. As much as tutoring his charges in aesthetics, Craig-Martin encouraged a businesslike sensibility, directing important people to Hirst’s Docklands show. He taught the Realpolitik of being an artist in the art-world. All these characters comprised a glittery network of connections that Becker would have soon recognised.
"Emin has an impressively dirty mind and a well-practised irreverence, but too much of her work fails to rise about stylish smut"At some point, possibly reluctantly, you have to look at the actual work. It’s useful to consider the images in Fullerton’s book without looking at the captions. (This was a technique adopted by mouthwash millionaire Alfred Barnes who left unlabelled his Impressionist collection at Merrion in Pennsylvania.) Try this and Artrage! offers only tepid excitement. Up-close, the shark shocks. Reproduced in print, it looks like a postage stamp with a marine biological theme.
Explicit sex and bloodthirstiness have always been important in art. There was Aphrodite’s comely bottom and many a lusty satyr. Judith hacking the head off Holofernes is academic splatter-porn; Bernini’s female saints are having orgasms. It would be interesting to count the number of nipples on display in the National Gallery. Yet, somehow, this all seems different from and better than Emin’s discussions of masturbation. She has an impressively dirty mind and a well-practised irreverence, but too much of her work fails to rise above stylish smut.
BritArt certainly has a fascination with genitals and body fluids. (Of Emin’s soiled knickers we have seen enough.) But what about Mat Collishaw’s cranial ice pick wound, taken from A Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology (1975) and widely read as a bloody vagina? Or the Chapman Brothers with their creepy erotic dolls? As an artist, you might have thought about doing that for about 20 seconds, then rejected it for a better idea. Ditto Sarah Lucas suggestively eating a banana. In 1993, Sam Taylor-Wood posed with her jeans around her ankles wearing a T-shirt with the legend “Fuck Suck Spank Wank.” She said it got her an exhibition. I showed this picture to a sceptic working in the media, a generation younger than the BritArt crew. He said a little wearily: “Is that all they had to do?”
Still, there were many good things about BritArt. There was a resistance to baffling and boring theory: they preferred making things and a good old-fashioned show. They had the best of the vigorous, creative spirit that defines Britain’s art education system. And they broke the cosy monopoly of the Cork Street galleries and dealers.
I took Fullerton’s book to Pharmacy 2, Hirst’s restaurant in his new art palazzo in Lambeth, to review my feelings over dinner. The decor is a riff on the drug carton-rammed medicine cabinets that were in Hirst’s degree show at Goldsmiths. The New York Times once said that Hirst’s intention was to fry your brain. Now his intention is to have his chef-patron Mark Hix fry your brik a l’oeuf in extra virgin olive oil. (It is, incidentally, a very good restaurant, even if the menu is crazily at odds with the interior design.)
Back to Fullerton. She is the sort of writer who feels the Tate has reins and that Serota took them. Although later, in what may have been a complicated manoeuvre requiring great athletic ability, Serota becomes a spearhead. Fullerton once worked for Reuters and Artrage! reads more like reportage than acute criticism or proper history.
But news was BritArt’s medium. Recently, there were reports that the shark, in 4,360 gallons of formaldehyde solution, is giving off noxious vapours. For those with eyes prepared to see, or noses prepared to smell, this was an evocative metaphor for BritArt.
