return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: blp Category: Art Date: 07 October 2006 Time: 11:34 PM Review: It seems to be really uncool to like the YBAs these days. No matter how much I encounter it, I'm always slightly caught off-guard by how much people hate artists like Gillian Wearing and Sarah Lucas, whom I generally think of as good. It's like some people can't say their names without spitting. I think the YBAs were conceptualism in its mannerist phase, which is to say, conceptualism (with minimalism thrown in) putting all the things back in that the early, austere phase of the tendency had excluded: spectacle, the personal, expressionism, expensive production values, even the decorative. Of course the result was that some of it was, contradictorily, conceptually thinner than sixties and seventies work and virtually all of it was politically hollow and overall it was conceptualism playing itself, in its death- throes, which is all of a piece with a mannerist phase. But still, on its own terms, I found the best of it exciting and interesting. I don't even mean that to sound as contemptuous as it possibly does. I think some of it was good. I was a fan. It had the confidence to be properly spare and striking. It had the relief of not doing too much, but doing what it did with wit and a purpose. But anyway, the point is that it was the end of something I can't believe art's got anywhere left to go now and that's why we keep ending up with these shows we can't get excited about. It's a busted flush.