Vanity fare - Vanity Fair magazine's description of London, England

ArtForum, May, 1997 by Richard Shone

I'm told by Newsweek, Vogue, and Vanity Fair that I'm living in the "coolest" city in the world. This journalistic revamp of London makes me feel self-conscious, like being congratulated by a friend on the "terrific new" jacket that in fact I've been wearing for years. For me, London is still, in Ezra Pound's phrase, "that old bitch gone in the teeth," a city that, despite its ersatz finery, I love.

Vanity Fair's March number describes a town catering mainly to people in their mid twenties with a lurch upward to the thirty-somethings - a public born for the most part in the 1960s, when London had its last big cultural facelift. VF contrasts the two eras, pitting Stones and Beatles against Oasis and Blur, Blow-Up and Darling against Trainspotting and Fever Pitch, Mary Quant and David Bailey against Patsy Kensit and Alexander McQueen. The London scene in the '60s was pretty restricted, as Terence Conran has pointed out, centering mostly on the King's Road, Chelsea, and parts of Notting Hill Gate; much of the rest of the city remained in a postwar time warp, whole areas being immune to visual and moral transgressions - for all the world as though they were still in an Ealing comedy (morphed, by the end of the decade, into a Joe Orton farce). Art did become fashionable again, although there's no reference in VF's '60s resume to the leather and lame of Royal College Pop, to David Hockney's coded graffiti or Bridget Riley's eye-dazzlers, or to Richard Hamilton's classic image of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser handcuffed during their brief drug-bust martyrdom. For the '90s, VF carries photos of our Damien in the Groucho Club (omitting to mention that he lives much of the time en famille, many rural miles from the capital of cool) and of our Rachel at a VF party, like a bemused mole whose tunneling has fetched it up at the River Cafe rather than the studio. Picture-bites of the dealer Jay Jopling and his father, and of the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, stand in for the rest of the yBa phenomenon.

If VF had wanted a more authentic spread of our cherished young things, it ought to have commissioned Johnnie Shand Kydd. At the Independent Art Space in March, Shand Kydd showed black-and-white photos recording some familiar faces at play - a Hello magazine feature on the fin de siecle, a Jennifer's Diary of artful drunkenness. The photos had an air of seedy veracity, akin to John Deakin's Soho snaps of the '50s. Their already historical look only bears out many visitors' comments that a scene, once documented, is over. Still, if anyone does want to know what Gary Hume or Adam Chodzko, Abigail Lane or Sarah Lucas, look like, these are the images to scrutinize. Plain or beautiful, alert or out cold, unaware or playing to the lens, the moods of the people in Shand Kydd's take-it-or-leave-it prints range between aggression and blissful oblivion. His photographs are a slice of life to be mined by anthropologists of the future.

Two elements present in the photos but missing from the media's encomia of London are violence and nostalgia. London has always taken its pleasures fearfully, going on the spree with an avid determination to stop the clock and hold mortality at arm's length. It has never had a docile public; fun and violence are part of every binge. Brawls outside bars and pubs are as frequent today as they were around theaters like the Globe in Shakespeare's time, when street fairs and unlicensed drinking generated violence of the kind you see now on club pavements come Saturday night. "No turn unstoned" was a favorite quip of rough music-hall audiences in the last century, when Bessie Bellwood could "wipe the bleedin' floor" with her hecklers and Rudyard Kipling witnessed a man cut his own throat outside Gatti's hall off the Strand. Retro music hall and dead comics are very much part of the coinage of current culture, their hard-won innocence more valued than their throw-back appeal. Gilbert & George were the first to pay homage, with their poignant rendition of Flanagan and Allen's "Underneath the Arches." More recently Mark Wallinger has paid tribute to the late comedian Tommy Cooper, of whom Damien Hirst can do a deadpan imitation. Violent Punch and Judy slapstick haunted Susan Hiller's 1990 video An Entertainment, and only the other day Abigail Lane threw a huge art-world party, bidding guests to enjoy the fire-eating, sword-swallowing Great Stromboli, an elderly figure whose whole art, in its flowery masochism, took one back a hundred years.

Nostalgia is more elusive. It is boredom's walker, a symptom of restlessness, the mark o f a society that is not at ease with its present and attempts a future in terms of its past. In the '60s and early '70s, nostalgia played a bittersweet role, part of a not-too-serious lament for a way of life going or gone. Today there's a yearning for some of the attack and elan that go with starting something new, but until that comes along we pass our time with sitcom repeats and gauzy, candlelit adaptations of Jane Austen, or try to recapture, in these postrecessional days, something of '80s pizzazz. The past hangs heavy on our hands: filmmakers still flock for locations to South Coast resorts, as though such places - Worthing, Brighton, Hastings, with their demotic piers and promenades, their Art Deco sun shelters and marina cafes - retained in their history a truer British spirit than does the world of today. Many of our novelists wallow in any time but the present. Nostalgia promotes a kind of Carry on English-ness that is the despair of people whose binoculars are fixed on scenery beyond these shores. Among those who still actually read, new foreign literature gets a raw deal, in contrast to the '80s, which saw a tremendous boom in translations of novels from, for example, Japan and Latin American countries. In the 1980s, the prestigious Booker Prize was given to several writers from outside Britain; in 1996, this literary award went to the resolutely British Last Orders, by Graham Swift (born London, 1949). New non-British art is often ignored or dismissed. Shows from abroad in contemporary galleries came thick and fast in the '80s; we still have them, but they generate less interest and discussion. The international interest in British artists now in their thirties has made the fledgling generation take success for granted; complacently grazing off the cachet of being young and British, they have lowered their sights to a circumscribed scene.