So, Damien Hirst's shark is starting to rot, Tracey Emin didn't win the 1999 Turner Prize and the other Bad Girl of the Young British Artists, Sarah Lucas, generally regarded as a strong contender for this year's prize, didn't even make it onto the shortlist. Moreover, in announcing the shortlist the Turner jury, adding insult to injury, took the opportunity to announce that the YBA party is over. This is all the more pointed given that, throughout the 1990s, the prize virtually became an in-house YBA award.
The YBA phenomenon had its genesis in the late 1980s London art scene. It reflected an American move towards variously cool, conceptual and minimal work after the gestural excesses of Neo-Expressionist painting, and it was fostered by a particular teaching regime at Goldsmiths College, overseen by Michael Craig-Martin. This regime fostered a culture of pragmatic, self-critical, intellectual rigour. When Goldsmiths graduates such as Damien Hirst started curating and staging exhibitions of their own work, advertising mogul and collector Charles Saatchi latched onto the energy and novelty of what they were doing and the YBAs had found their Medici.
It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of Saatchi's role in the success of the YBAs, though it is also true that from the first Hirst was a gifted and industrious promoter, cadging gallery mailing lists and dragging the great and the good in to see his warehouse exhibitions by the scruff of the neck. His three-part Freeze is generally cited as the landmark warehouse show, but it was one among many.
What some of the YBAs brought to the neo-conceptual mix was the shock value of a raucous, streetwise, pop sensibility.
In contrast to the intellectual austerity and linguistic obsessions of what might be termed classical conceptualism, their work developed to be dark, funny, ephemeral - and relatively accessible. Looking at a piece by pioneering high-conceptualist Joseph Kosuth is equivalent to speed-reading a thesis on some arcane branch of critical theory. By contrast, absorbing a typical work by Sarah Lucas is like listening to a one-liner by a stand-up comic. And conceptual oneliners came to dominate one whole strand of YBA endeavour.
The YBA movement was not really a movement in a stylistic sense. It was from the first hugely diverse, encompassing anything from the anarchic iconoclasm of Tracey Emin's infamous tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 to the rarefied world of Sam Taylor-Wood's staged photographic tableaux, from Jake and Dinos Chapman's toy soldier atrocities to Rachel Whiteread's severe metaphysical vision, most famously expressed in her concrete cast of the interior of a demolished House in east London.
Now Tate supremo Nicholas Serota, the most powerful figure in the contemporary British art world, has said that it is over, that it's time for mature multiculturalism to displace the excessively London-centric view of the YBAs. He went on to point out, rather churlishly it has to be said, that anyway they weren't even young any more. In a surprising bid to pre-empt the verdict of history, he applied a verbal coup de grace: "The YBAs will be regarded as a phenomenon of the 1990s, not something to continue into the 21st century."
The Turner prize jury's nomination of three non-British artists (the Japanese Tomoko Takahashi, Dutchman Michael Raedecker and German Wolfgang Tillmans, the favourite to win the prize), and its eschewal of Sarah Lucas and Martin Creed, another widely tipped artist, captured the headlines. But hardly anyone pointed out that the remarks about the YBAs represented some rather odd carry-on on the part of an award scheme designed to raise the profile of contemporary art in Britain. Rather than celebrating or acknowledging the achievements of artists, the tone of Serota's remarks is to tell them what they ought to be doing. Like the once celebrated, now generally reviled American art critic Clement Greenberg, the Turner has become prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Yet whatever of the YBA movement per se, reports of Brit-Art's demise are certainly exaggerated. Damien Hirst's shark, which is titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Some- one Living, has not been exhibited much, but it has earned iconic status for itself, a status that transcends its current circumstances. While Hirst's recent efforts have attracted a fairly lacklustre critical response, as one of the most successful artists in the world today, he is not exactly languishing.
Then take the Turner shortlist itself. It is an interesting list, but not quite the dramatic departure it pretends to be. Of the four artists, only Glenn Brown is British. But he is more than British, he is a YBA - he showed in Sensation. He makes parodic versions of paintings by other artists, from Rembrandt to Auerbach.
Everything he does is ironic, and irony is the lifeblood of the YBAs. The other three shortlisted artists have flourished in the YBA milieu. Even the YBA cradle, Goldsmiths College, is still a common denominator.
It is also presumptuous of Serota to try to kill off a movement that the Tate was in fact, relatively slow to acknowledge. Like the Oscars, the Turner has often seemed to lag behind wider public perceptions. When they eventually awarded one to Damien Hirst, in 1995, it was like an afterthought, as though it had occurred to them how silly they'd look in retrospect if they didn't.
The presence of Glenn Brown and Michael Raedecker, another painter, on the list have also prompted people to suggest that fashion is moving away from object-orientated conceptual art and hands-off minimalism back towards an art of really making things, in a fussy, skilful, old-fashioned way.
There has indeed been a renewed focus of attention on work such as Raedecker's, but that is largely part of a cyclical process. Painting has always been part and parcel of the YBA movement, albeit a sporadically acknowledged, peripheral part.
Painter Chris Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998. One of the most inventive painters to have emerged in the 1990s, Goldsmiths graduate Fiona Rae was in Damien Hirst's original Freeze exhibition. Jenny Saville, who established her reputation with vast, fleshy nudes, has become one of the best-known British artists of her generation. Gary Hume represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year.
In one sense however, Serota is quite right. Several, though by no means all, of the YBAs have moved on. We're beginning to get a sense of them less as embodiments of a cultural moment, more in terms of the long haul: addressing questions of how they will develop their work over the span of a career. Charles Saatchi's bid to identify a second wave of talent, with his awkwardly titled New Neurotic Realist show last year, didn't make anything like the same concerted impression as Hirst and friends, though the central figure, the painter and writer Martin Maloney (another ex-YBA), is an ambitious and tireless self-publicist in the Hirst mould. And, of course, one of this year's Turner shortlist artists, Tomoko Takahashi, was included in that show.
So perhaps Saatchi, rather than the Tate, is still setting the agenda. ET
