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

ArtForum, May, 1997 by Richard Shone

As to the London art world in general, yes, it's busy, it has its stars, its Oscars and Bookers, its expectations from the National Lottery (whereby gambled millions go to museums and culture complexes), a Museum of Modern Art in the offing. Every now and again there's a scruffy little scandal - the Robert Mapplethorpe show amputated of "offending material" at the Hayward Gallery, Sotheby's tarnished over hanky-panky deals, the Royal Academy's embezzling treasurer. Galleries come and go with new-diet frequency, refashioning our taste every fifteen minutes: Sadie Cole's HQ in Soho and the Approach above a pub in the East End are two promising recent arrivals. There is even a faint generosity of spirit in the air, for we want to continue the momentum begun a decade ago. But it's hard going: London still doesn't have the necessary depth of collectors and reviewers. Although the former are certainly on the increase, Charles Saatchi remains the only name that can be placed among the great international bulk-buyers; later this year, selections from his eclectic holdings of young British art are going on show at the Royal Academy, a welcome but controversial venue. The show may well put the fat in the fire, but also some money in the Academy's impoverished coffers.

As for art writers, there's hardly one on the dailies and Sundays who isn't mealy-mouthed, suspicious, or downright cynical. Having become, as Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, "after-dinner speakers at the victory party," they have their backs against the wall: how to maintain their earlier stance of indifference or downright abuse? How to praise when formerly they came to bury? You can be sure, though, that they won't eat their words as the celebrations go on around them. You have the feeling they would rather be doing almost anything than looking at recent art, but they parade before us their hebdomadal degradation and cower in the shadow of ignorant arts editors. Tart listings make do for serious criticism. Weaned as I was on John Russell, Guy Brett, Lawrence Gowing, Nigel Gosling, and David Sylvester, that childhood can only seem a golden age.

It isn't just the young who are neglected or dismissed. Take, for example, Michael Craig-Martin's exhibition in February and March at Waddington. He showed brilliantly colored paintings of free-floating objects, works that continue his earlier themes and imagery yet find him in an unmistakably new phase. The show was justly popular and every painting was sold. But Mr. Ingleby of the Independent found nothing but what was on the surface (his problem surely?); Mr. Packer in the Financial Times, while acknowledging Craig-Martin's yBa-godfather status, found the drawing lacking; and Mr. McEwen in the Sunday Telegraph condemned the show for its commercial appeal, as though it were morally reprehensible to sell. Meanwhile, in the same period as Craig-Martin's show, these and other newspapers carried no less than eight reviews of a first novel (name and author now forgotten) that they nearly all judged to be entirely vin ordinaire. You can imagine how the younger artists fare, although, as all of them have grown up in an era of critical cynicism or neglect, their expectations are minimal.