© MARC QUINN, PHOTO: MARC QUINN STUDIO, COURTESY JAY JOPLING / WHITE CUBE (LONDON)
00 rt is the cherry on top of capitalism,†Dinos Chapman, one half of the Chapman Brothers, the artists best known for creating child mannequins sprouting genitalia, declared recently. For those who needed it rammed home, he explained: “Collecting art is a belief system for atheists.†And so the decade proved. With no discernible change in style seen from the YBAs – “they’re stuck, stuck, stuck†chortled The Stuckists, a group of artists determined to revive interest in painting – all eyes switched from the studios to the British auction houses. And there, buoyed by sackloads of money from China and Russia, prices went sky high as collectors went mad for British contemporary art. Damien Hirst spotted the potential. He sold £111mworth of work at one London auction this year, making him a dollar billionaire. And the public sector did its bit. Tate Modern opened, and Lottery money was poured into new contemporary art galleries from Gateshead to Bexhill-on-Sea, from Walsall to Middlesborough.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART
An expensive lesson Nothing came better to symbolise the saleroom fever in the mid-part of the decade than the night at Sotheby’s in February 2007 when Peter Doig, a little-known British artist, became for a while Europe’s most expensive living painter. A fierce bidding war drove the price of his painting, White Canoe, up to £5.7m, five times its estimate. Suddenly Doig — not a member of the Britart pack and barely a household name, although he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 — was more collectable than Hockney, Freud, Hirst or Hodgkin. Doig didn’t get the money. Charles Saatchi was the owner but Doig said: “It made me feel sick. That somebody should have spent that much money on a painting of mine seemed so unconnected with anything that I ever did.â€
Alison Lapper Pregnant — Marc Quinn
Pregnant pause in Trafalgar Square As London went modern art crazy, even Trafalgar Square, home to military honours, was pressed into use. The “Fourth Plinthâ€, vacant of any statue since it was put up in 1841, became a platform for a rolling programme to show a newly commissioned sculpture every year. One of the most memorable was Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, an 11ft marble statue of Lapper, an artist who was born without arms and truncated legs, which stood on show in 2005. Quinn said that it was a counterblast to “phallic†Nelson’s Column and an opportunity to celebrate disability. It proved popular with the public but not with Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal. “It looks like overused soap on a very large scale,†he roared. © JACK VETTRIANO 1992, WWW.JACKVETTRIANO.COM
For the Love of God — Damien Hirst Frank Dunphy, Hirst’s business manager, revealed that Hirst had retained two-thirds.
Hello, Tate Modern The celebrities promised — such as Madonna and Elton John — did not join the 4,000-strong crowd for the opening party on May 15, 2000, but in every other respect the £135m transformation of the Bankside power station into a temple for contemporary art has been little short of miraculous. The Doubting Thomases, the critics of the avant garde, were proved spectacularly wrong. In its first year, Tate Modern had 5.25 million visitors, making it the most popular museum of contemporary art in the world, better than either MoMA in New York or the Pompidou in Paris. The numbers have stayed up and only the British Museum gets more visitors. Meanwhile, the new gallery — with the help of the Globe, the National Theatre, the Southbank Centre and the NFT — has transformed the South Bank of the Thames into Europe’s most exciting cultural quarter. “If modern art is the new British religion,†declared the pundit Andrew Marr, “then Tate Modern is the new St Paul’s.†The gallery swept away the old tradition of showing objects chronologically. It invented new “themes†and galleries were given titles such as Body, Society and Memory. It meant Gilbert & George were shown with Mondrian and Richard Long with Monet. Visitors were particularly amused by Sam Taylor-Wood’s video of a naked man dancing to Samuel Barber’s Adagio. WORLD PICTURES/PHOTOSHOOT
The Singing Butler — Jack Vettriano
The outsider Ignored by the metropolitan elite and the avant garde, the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano is an oddity. Self-taught from a painting-by-numbers book, he has been called painting’s answer to Jeffrey Archer and his sexually charged film noir style has been dismissed as “shopping mall artâ€. The big public galleries refuse to exhibit his work. Tongue in cheek, he once suggested that they might prefer his pictures if they had a homosexual theme. But Vettriano has a huge popular following and earns £500,000 a year from poster and postcard sales alone. And at Sotheby’s in 2004, The Singing Detective, one of his best known paintings, sold for £750,000, a Scottish record. “I can only be proud that I touch so many people,†he said.
Tate Modern
© DAMIEN HIRST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2008
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Diamonds to die for The iconic image seen as the symbol of the decade’s pre-credit-crunch excesses is Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds costing around £12m, commissioned by a Bond Street jeweller. Though one critic dismissed it as “vacuous nonsenseâ€, the artist said it was a profound statement about death and put it on sale for £50 million. Hirst said that he was pleased with the result as he was afraid it might turn out like an Ali G ring. Collectors were not so forthcoming. Though Hirst’s staff said there were several interested parties, the piece was eventually bought by “a consortium†including Hirst.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH The Daily Telegraph Saturday, October 25, 2008 telegraph.co.uk /gordonsgin In association with
The envy of the art world F ROM Hockney and Hirst, to Bridget Riley and Tracey Emin, the past 50 years of British art have been a roller-coaster ride of styles and tastes, coloured along the way with stunts and hoaxes, rows and fights and a good many eccentrics. This supplement, the second in a se
60 I t wasn’t just London’s King’s Road that was swinging. Emerging from the post-war austerity years, British art was in the vanguard of change as youth demanded that its voice (and tastes) be heard. The new art was a giddy mix – Pop Art, Op Art, a fresh wave of abstraction, art “happenin
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART © RICHARD HAMILTON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2008 ICA gets stuck In 1968 the ICA, the forcing house of the avant garde, moved to its new home in The Mall, lost its way and, seemingly, never looked forward again. Founded in the basement of an Oxford Stre
70 E verything and anything seemed possible. Conceptualism flourished, as did performance art, and artists could be Post-minimalists, Neo-expressionists, Installationists, or even Neoists specialising in pranks, fakes, plagiarism and paradoxes. The careers of the big-name painters – Hockney, Bacon
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART Moments of Decision/Indecision, 1975 — Stuart Brisley Brisley gets grisly In an era of eccentric British performance art, Stuart Brisley was the godfather. His 1972 work 10 Days, performed in Berlin, involved sitting at a table for 10 days. The food he
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80 G rowth, growth, growth. This is the decade when British contemporary art began to become serious business and London could start to mount a challenge to New York as “capital of coolâ€. More widespread public interest, and yuppies with cash in their pockets thanks to Mrs Thatcher, meant YBAs c
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART C-PRINT, 152.4 X 121.9 CM, EDITION OF 3, ©SARAH LUCAS, COURTESY SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON Kapoor goes large He has been called the new Henry Moore, though his sculptures are more monumental still. Anish Kapoor, the Indian-born but Britishbased artist, rose
90 W illiam Wordsworth, a century before, could not have put it better. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!†he wrote in The Prelude. And for Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, the Chapman Brothers, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn (they were not all f
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART © DAMIEN HIRST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2008 Space Girl and Bird — Banksy Laughing all the way to the Banksy In the Nineties, uncommonly witty graffiti slogans and paintings appeared overnight in Bristol, London, then the world. Most are attributed
© MARC QUINN, PHOTO: MARC QUINN STUDIO, COURTESY JAY JOPLING / WHITE CUBE (LONDON) 00 rt is the cherry on top of capitalism,†Dinos Chapman, one half of the Chapman Brothers, the artists best known for creating child mannequins sprouting genitalia, declared recently. For those who needed it ramm
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH ART Now, and into the future PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY, LONDON © GRAYSON PERRY Win £500 to spend on art, plus a year’s supply of Gordon’s Feel inspired by this romp through the defining moments of modern art? Then enjoy a piece
