60-05 Young British Artists

From Pickled Sharks to Diamond Skulls: How a Generation of Rebels Redrew the Map of Art In the blistering summer of 1988, Damien Hirst organised the Freeze exhibition in a disused London Port Authority warehouse at Surrey Docks. It was less a student showcase than a hostile takeover of the art world — and it launched the Young British Artists. This lecture traces the full arc of the YBA movement, from the entrepreneurial spirit of that first Freeze show to the diamond-encrusted excess of Hirst's For the Love of God (2007). Along the way we explore: — Michael Craig-Martin's radical pedagogy at Goldsmiths, replacing "how to paint" with "how to think", earning him the title godfather of the YBAs — Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — a fourteen-foot tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde, purchased for £6,000 but costing £50,000 to produce — Rachel Whiteread's House (1993), a full-scale concrete cast of the interior of a condemned Victorian terrace in Bethnal Green, winner of the Turner Prize — Michael Landy's Break Down (2001), in which he systematically destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions — 5.75 tonnes of waste — as a devastating act of self-annihilation — The 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, which cemented the YBAs as Britain's national cultural brand under Tony Blair's Cool Britannia — The movement's end: the 2004 Momart warehouse fire and the 2008 death of original Freeze artist Angus Fairhurst The YBAs paved the way for Tate Modern and proved that contemporary art could be a mass-audience spectacle. But they also left a haunting question: in a world where everything is a commodity and everyone is a brand, can art ever achieve a truly visceral, un-ironic impact again? My notes are: https://www.shafe.co.uk/wp-content/up... #arthistory #youngbritishartists #art