Young British art: Kate Bush on the YBA sensation

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Kate Bush

As journalism embraced YBA, criticism abandoned it: Britart has no Bergers or Burgins to call its own. The art historian Julian Stallabrass, whose courageous book High Art Lite of 1999 remains the only detailed critical excavation of the period, argues that YBA itself is inimical to criticism because it refuses any cultural or intellectual responsibility.

"Instead," he writes of Sarah Lucas's Sunday Sport pieces, "a pervasive and disabling irony becalms the work in a manner that is supposed, in conventional wisdom, to challenge the viewer but which in fact conveniently opens up demotic material to safe aesthetic delectation." Indeed, the writing most closely identified with YBA exercised a related form of intellectual disavowal en route to becoming one of the best-selling contemporary-art books ever. Matthew Collings's Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop (1997) is a subjective, satirical commentary, written with the epigrammatic fluency of a good journalist and couched in a tone of slightly bored detachment. Juiced up with anecdotes, gossip, and opinion, Blimey! flaunts a breezy, irreverent style that can be, by turns, just like the art: absorbing, accessible, and outrageous--or utterly, embarrassingly banal. Collings invented the perfect voice to complement YBA: He makes an impact without (crucially) ever appearing to try too hard. The absence of any critical agenda in his writing is, according to Collings, a willful response to an age in which the avant-garde is "an official-one and therefore a pseudo one." Ironically, given that he is more than anyone identified with the dumbing down of art discourse, Collings is at heart a Greenbergian formalist who believes that "populism and art are not meant to go together." Stallabrass, on the contrary, would like to believe that art can be popular--in the sense of accessible to all--and yet still contribute to a morally and intellectually ameliorative culture. In High Art Lite he concludes that in trying to sustain the difficult balancing act of appealing concurrently to the art world and to a mass audience, YBA ultimately fails at both. Culturally aimless, it is an art that ends up mimicking an idea of art. In 1997, when Stallabrass locked horns with another Marxist, John Roberts, over YBA in the pages of Art Monthly magazine, their debate stalled around vexed definitions of populism and popular culture. Roberts, uniquely among critical theorists, has defended YBA's populism as being somehow politically efficacious. He has praised YBA's nonelitist appeal and has tried to account for it by positively recuperating the term "philistine" (which he later qualifies as an abstract position, rather than an inherent quality): "The philistine is the revenge of the proletarian non-specialist spectator on postmodernism's abstractly bodied theorist of pleasure." The artists--so his argument goes--are working-class "bad" girls and boys who refuse to distance themselves from the "proletarian" energies and "alienated" pleasures of popular culture. In annexing the common, rude, and entertaining elements of working-class popular culture to their art, the YBAs produce work that resonates meaningfully with that culture. Roberts's argument is often dense and convoluted and, Stallabrass objected, potentially offensive in its identification of YBA's strategies of vulgarity and profanity with working-class culture itself--as well as excessively idealistic for imagining a collective popular culture to exist detached from powerful commercial interest in some ideology-free zone. Whichever side of this particular argument one supports, it remains the case that criticism has yet to finish its account of Young British Art and its reception, has yet to parse the important things this curious phenomenon has to tell us about the shifting relationship between high art, mass culture, and a new audience for art at the twentieth century's end.