Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst

Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. Cambridge: 21 Publishing, Ltd., 1997. 209 pp. $29.95 paper.

If "Sensation" had not opened so soon after Princess Diana's funeral (waist-high heaps of cellophane-wrapped floral tributes were still wilting on the park lawns in front of Kensington Palace), this large exhibition of recently trendy British contemporary art would have generated even more hype than it did. Even so, an unusually high level of media attention accompanied its opening at the Royal Academy, which for the occasion cast aside its stuffy posture as the backbone of the establishment. On September 18, 1997 (opening day), television reporters, British bobbles, tourists, and members of Mothers against Murder and Aggression packed the museum's courtyard. MMA was protesting the inclusion in the exhibition of Marcus Harvey's 1995 Chuck Close - like portrait of notorious serial child-killer Myra Hindley, whose monochrome likeness the artist had rendered using the tiny handprints of a child.(1) (Harvey's more typical, impastoed work relates him to the Kitchen Sink painters of the fifties.)

London television news broadcasts and news papers immediately registered the requisite outrage over the exhibition. "The Royal Academy of Porn" read the Daily Mirror headline. Sculptor Michael Sandie resigned from the Academy in protest, saying "this is the most despicable thing the Royal Academy rulers have ever done."(2) Others obligingly labeled the show obscene, offensive, and tasteless. The result? A predictably boffo box office. (Sex and violence sell!) Reacting to the publicity with the customary reflex, an audience of over 650,000 people queued up during the three-month run to see what the fuss was about. The Royal Academy's coffers were enriched and curator Norman "Zeitgeist" Rosenthal had once again skillfully ridden inside the curl of the wave of artistic fashion.

Perhaps the most pertinent discomfort the exhibition provoked was not caused by the works themselves but by the cozy relationship that underlay the whole event. This was the rapprochement existing between the Royal Academy and Charles Saatchi. In short, Saatchi had managed virtually to buy the store. Items from his collection comprised the bulk of the works included in the show. And not only did the legendary advertising mogul lend the art from his own collection and pay for its shipping and the insurance, he also served as the exhibition's co-curator.(3)

The historic and aesthetic worth of the actual exhibition must be considered in light of a larger set of goals that underpinned it. Several things seem to have been going on at once. First, the aggrandizement of Saatchi's position as England's own post-modern Medici and the validation of his taste by that bastion of the establishment, the Royal Academy. Second, old-fashioned boosterism wearing the timely costume of cultural tourism. The agenda underlying the show's positioning and marketing was the promotion of new British art as the ne plus ultra of contemporary art and the ratification of London as the new center of the contemporary art world. This understandably chauvinistic exercise brimmed with hope that British art could now vanquish New York. "Can London become the unchallenged centre for the practice and presentation of contemporary art?" (8) asked Rosenthal in his catalogue essay, going on to cite as positive evidence the hotted-up circumstances of the current London scene.

Did it work? After all the puffing and preening, how radical, how "original," how actually shocking is this new British art? To an American weaned on Vito Acconci, Bill Viola, Jeff Koons, David Salle, Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith, etc., "Sensation" came across as a fascinating but day-old pluralist salad of art historical and design references, pop culture borrowings, social documentary, autobiography, domesticated formalism, and eighties video and installation art. Much of the work exemplified one of the consistently alternating currents in British art, that of assimilation of foreign influences.

Unruly and vast, "Sensation" incorporated some 120 works by 42 artists exploiting every kind of material and medium installed in the Royal Academy's main galleries. Sculpture and videos also turned up in unexpected and now-and-then awkward places such as the museum stairwells and halls. The prevailing sensibility of this polyglot assortment was unruly, witty, egalitarian, body-obsessed, and dysfunctional. It seemed to this viewer that in spite of the self-consciously provocative attitude of so many of these works, the rather awkward mix of international styles artists were using to express themselves undercut the vigor of their often gripping content. The Royal Academy's galleries were more awash with a sophisticated awareness of marketing, design, and techniques of self-promotion rather than with aesthetic innovation. And underneath the scatological accessorizing and the social commentary of much of this work there remained something deeply aesthetically conservative. What appeared to be innovation often turned out to be only skin-deep.