Now establishment figures,the YBAs were enfants terribles when they first caused a sensation, so why was their work deemed so revolutionary?Twenty-five years ago Damien Hirst do a 13ft tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde and Marc Quinn created a frozen cast of his head from nine pints of his own blood. At around the same time the British adman and collector Charles Saatchi was turning his attention away from American and German art towards a ragtag bunch of artists emerging on his home turf. He paid £12000 for Quinn’s Self and £50000 for Hirst to translate his beer mat sketches of a shark into the reality of an Australian fisherman’s catch, or eventually to enter the gallery space as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the intellect of Someone Living.
The Young British Artists are nowadays synonymous with celebrity and fortune – Hirst is the richest artist in the world and Quinn’s works sell for millions. But to focus simply on market success ignores the kaleidoscopic diversity of art produced by arguably the most important group to emerge in Britain since the pre-Raphaelites. “Suddenly it felt like there was this home-grown movement,energy, art being made here, or that was really relevant and in-the-moment,” says the gallerist Sadie Coles. “It felt like London could become a modern city instead of being a postwar, miserable, and unsophisticated backwater.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com