Young British art: Kate Bush on the YBA sensation

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Kate Bush

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While Hirst learned his artistic presentation skills from Koons and Haim Steinbach (his aquariums and cabinets are on one level simply enlarged variations of their vitrines and shelves, respectively), he also recognized in Koons the value of a branded artistic identity (a notion reinforced by the careers of both Georg Baselitz and Gilbert & George, which Hirst observed firsthand working at Anthony d'Offay Gallery while in art school). This is explicit by 1996 when he describes, in Modern Painters, his spot and spin paintings as "almost like a logo as an idea of myself as an artist." But where Koons--and, of course, Koons's role model, Warhol--both critiqued and participated in the mass media's construction of celebrity by using the media simultaneously as a central subject of his art and as a promotional vehicle, with Hirst, and later with Tracey Emin, no comparable conceptual interchange between the media and the art occurs. Instead, Hirst courted the media one-dimensionally to generate a cult of personality, while encouraging journalists to depict his artistic persona as (schizo-phrenically) alternative and avant-garde, as well as glamorous and aspirational. Hirst hagiographer Gordon Burn, for example, could write romantically of the millionaire, restaurant-owning pop-impresario artist in The Guardian as late as April 2000 that "he has always used drugs and drink as a way of isolating himself from banal experience and to bring him to something original or extraordinary in the moment that nobody else can see."

Copious profiles, interviews, and articles on YBA's leading players have featured frequently in the quality papers, while both broadsheets and tabloids have engaged in feeding frenzies over the reliably regular trail of demolitions, vandalisms, defacements, profligacies, and delinquencies that YBA has left in its wake. The press has been affronted by the extravagance of Rachel Whiteread's House, 1993, in deprived borough Tower Hamlets--then horrified at its 1994 destruction by Hackney Council. Outraged by Marcus Harvey's exploitation of '60s child-killer Myra Hindley's mug shot in his painting Myra, 1995--The Sport described the artist as a "young bastard" who was "swanning around lslington enjoying the toasts of artworld ponces and practically having a w*nk over the reaction to his painting"--then gleeful when it was spattered with India ink and half a dozen eggs, while on display in "Sensation." The media has been entertained by Tracey Emin's drunken histrionics on national television in 1997--then aghast at the state, not to mention the price, of My Bed, 1998. Contemptuous of Martin Creed's 2001 Turner Prize-winning Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off--then bemused by transvestite Essex potter Grayson Perry's 2003 acceptance speech. But lest anyone be deceived that the British media's interest in contemporary art stems from motives purer than the pressure to deliver a stream of fresh-faced Art Idols who can be counted on for a paragraph of crackling copy: Witness the savagery of its reaction to the Momart Leyton warehouse fire this May, in which hundreds of irreplaceable artworks--from seminal Patrick Heron paintings to the Chapmans' extraordinary Hell, 1998-2000--were destroyed. Quality Sunday paper The Observer, shockingly typical in its taunting, described a "Bonfire of the Vanities" and deemed that, "What happened at Leyton was at worst a mishap, at best perhaps an overdue act of aesthetic cleansing.... Fire is reliably clean and purgative. Who needs criticism when cremation is an option?"