Young British Artists

Based on Wikipedia: Young British Artists

The Shark in the Room

In 1991, a dead tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde became the most talked-about artwork in Britain. It wasn't hanging in the Tate or the National Gallery. It was owned by an advertising mogul, created by a twenty-six-year-old art student, and it had a title longer than most poems: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

The shark would come to symbolize an entire generation of artists who rewrote the rules of the British art world. They called themselves—or rather, the press called them—the Young British Artists, often abbreviated to YBAs. And for about a decade, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, they dominated contemporary art in ways that still provoke arguments today.

Were they visionaries or charlatans? Revolutionary talents or skilled self-promoters? The answer, like most interesting answers, is complicated.

The Warehouse Generation

The story begins not in a gallery but in an abandoned administrative building in London's Docklands. In 1988, a second-year art student named Damien Hirst organized an exhibition called Freeze. He convinced sixteen of his fellow students from Goldsmiths College to show their work in this derelict space—a location usually described as a "warehouse," though it was technically an office block waiting for demolition.

No commercial gallery would touch them. These were unknown students showing conceptual work that didn't fit neatly into any market category. So they did it themselves.

This matters more than it might seem. The exhibition coincided with the acid house movement sweeping through Britain—illegal raves held in abandoned industrial spaces, fueled by electronic music and ecstasy. Freeze tapped into that same energy of youth claiming forgotten urban spaces for their own purposes. The art world's equivalent of a warehouse rave.

Not many people actually attended. The press barely noticed. But something had shifted. Artists realized they didn't need permission from established institutions. They could create their own contexts, their own audiences, their own markets.

The Goldsmiths Factory

Nearly all the core YBAs emerged from the same place: the Bachelor of Arts Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, University of London. This wasn't coincidental. Goldsmiths had developed a distinctive teaching philosophy that emphasized conceptual thinking over traditional craft skills.

The graduating classes of 1987 through 1990 read like a who's who of 1990s British art. The class of 1987 included Liam Gillick, Fiona Rae, and Sarah Lucas. In 1988: Ian Davenport, Michael Landy, Gary Hume, Anya Gallaccio, and Angela Bulloch. The class of 1989 produced Damien Hirst himself, along with Angus Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw, and Abigail Lane. Gillian Wearing and Sam Taylor-Wood graduated in 1990.

The teaching staff during these years included Michael Craig-Martin, an Irish-American conceptual artist whose own work—like An Oak Tree, which consists of a glass of water on a shelf accompanied by a text explaining it is actually an oak tree—embodied the intellectual approach these students would absorb and transform.

What Goldsmiths taught, more than any specific technique, was audacity. The confidence that an idea could be art, that presentation mattered as much as creation, that the artist's persona was part of the work.

The Patron Saint of Shock

Enter Charles Saatchi.

If you've never heard the name, Saatchi was one half of Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency that helped Margaret Thatcher win three elections with campaigns like "Labour Isn't Working." By the late 1980s, he had become one of the world's most influential art collectors, with a particular talent for spotting emerging movements before they became expensive.

Saatchi visited Freeze. He visited a follow-up exhibition called Gambler in 1990, arriving, according to witnesses, in a green Rolls-Royce. There he encountered Hirst's A Thousand Years: a large glass case containing a rotting cow's head, maggots, and flies. The maggots hatched into flies, which fed on the head, then died on an electric fly-killer suspended in the case. A complete life cycle, grotesque and mesmerizing.

Saatchi stood open-mouthed. Then he bought it.

This began a relationship that would define the YBA movement. Saatchi didn't just collect their work—he enabled it. His patronage meant young artists could create ambitious, large-scale pieces that no commercial gallery would risk commissioning. His converted warehouse gallery in north London provided space to show work that wouldn't fit anywhere else.

The timing was crucial. Britain's contemporary art market had collapsed in 1990 during a severe recession. Galleries closed. Auction prices plummeted. Established artists struggled. But Saatchi, wealthy from advertising, kept buying. He shifted his focus from American and German artists to these hungry young Brits who would work for relatively little and produce provocative pieces that generated publicity.

The Art of Controversy

And publicity was the point—or at least, publicity was the fuel.

The YBAs developed what critics called "shock tactics." Hirst's preserved animals. Tracey Emin's My Bed, which was exactly what it sounds like: her actual unmade bed, complete with stained sheets, discarded condoms, empty vodka bottles, and used underwear. Marcus Harvey's Myra, a massive portrait of the child killer Myra Hindley composed of children's handprints.

These works generated outrage. Outrage generated headlines. Headlines generated gallery attendance. Attendance justified institutional support. It was a self-reinforcing cycle, and the YBAs rode it expertly.

The Turner Prize became their annual showcase. This award, given since 1984 to a British visual artist under fifty, had always courted some controversy. But with YBA nominees and winners—Rachel Whiteread in 1993, Damien Hirst in 1995, Gillian Wearing in 1997, Chris Ofili in 1998—it became appointment television. Channel 4 sponsored the prize and broadcast profiles of nominees during prime time. Suddenly contemporary art was dinner table conversation.

When Tracey Emin was nominated in 1999 for My Bed, the tabloids couldn't resist. Here was art that required no expertise to understand—everyone knows what an unmade bed looks like—and yet the art establishment was treating it as profound statement. You could mock it or defend it, but you couldn't ignore it.

Sensation

The movement's apex came in 1997 with an exhibition called Sensation.

The Royal Academy of Arts, that most establishment of British institutions, agreed to show Charles Saatchi's private collection. This was controversial before a single work went on display. Three Royal Academicians resigned in protest. Critics questioned whether a public institution should effectively advertise a private collector's holdings.

Then people actually saw the art.

Harvey's Myra was attacked with eggs and ink. Protesters gathered outside. Newspapers ran breathless coverage. When the exhibition toured to New York two years later, controversy erupted again over Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporated elephant dung and images from pornographic magazines into a depiction of the Madonna. Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to withdraw city funding from the Brooklyn Museum. The Catholic League organized protests.

The YBAs had achieved something remarkable: they had made contemporary art matter to people who normally couldn't care less about contemporary art. Whether that attention was good for art, or good for them, remained debatable.

The Business of Being an Artist

What set the YBAs apart from previous avant-garde movements wasn't just their work—it was their attitude toward commerce.

Earlier generations of provocative artists had often positioned themselves against the market. The Dadaists and Surrealists saw capitalism as part of what they were attacking. The Situationists explicitly rejected the art market. Even the American Abstract Expressionists, who eventually became enormously valuable, cultivated images as tortured outsiders.

The YBAs had no such pretensions. They were, as one critic noted, "both oppositional and entrepreneurial." They wanted to shock the establishment and join it. Damien Hirst didn't just make art—he built a business empire, eventually bypassing galleries entirely to sell work directly through Sotheby's auctions. Tracey Emin became a brand, licensing her distinctive handwriting for everything from champagne labels to hotel interiors.

This was honest, in a way. Art has always been entangled with money and patronage. The Medicis commissioned Michelangelo. The Dutch Golden Age painters served a merchant class hungry for status symbols. Why pretend otherwise?

But it also raised questions about what the work actually meant. When shock becomes a marketing strategy, is it still shocking? When provocation is calculated for maximum press coverage, is it still provocation?

The Supporting Cast

Hirst and Emin became the faces of the movement, but the YBA label covered a wide range of artists with distinctly different practices.

Rachel Whiteread made casts of negative spaces—the area under a bed, the inside of a house—transforming absence into solid form. Her 1993 work House, a concrete cast of an entire Victorian terraced house in East London, won her the Turner Prize and immediate demolition by the local council.

The Chapman Brothers—Jake and Dinos—created elaborate sculptural nightmares, miniature hellscapes populated by thousands of hand-painted Nazi figures. Their work Hell, destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, depicted nine glass cases arranged in a swastika formation, filled with scenes of apocalyptic violence.

Gary Hume painted doors. Literally: he made paintings based on the institutional doors found in hospitals and schools, using glossy household paint to create sleek, seductive surfaces. Later he turned to figurative work—portraits, flowers, birds—but always with that same high-gloss finish that made his paintings feel like objects as much as images.

Gillian Wearing worked with video and photography, exploring identity, confession, and the relationship between public and private selves. Her Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say consisted of photographs of strangers holding handwritten signs revealing their inner thoughts—a police officer with a sign reading "HELP," a businessman announcing "I'M DESPERATE."

Chris Ofili incorporated elephant dung into elaborately beautiful paintings that drew on African imagery, hip-hop culture, and Catholic iconography. The dung wasn't just provocative material—it served as both paint and sculptural support, with balls of it propping up his canvases.

The Ecosystem

Movements don't happen in isolation. The YBAs emerged within an ecosystem of dealers, critics, curators, and publications who helped shape their reception and market.

Jay Jopling opened White Cube gallery in 1993, initially in a tiny room in Duke Street, St James's. The space was so small—about the size of a bathroom—that it could only show one work at a time. This limitation became a strength, forcing concentrated attention on individual pieces. Jopling represented many of the leading YBAs and eventually married one of them, Sam Taylor-Wood.

Before Jopling, Karsten Schubert had been the first dealer to show several future YBAs, exhibiting Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, and Michael Landy just months after Freeze.

Maureen Paley's Interim Art gallery in East London gave early exposure to Gillian Wearing and Wolfgang Tillmans. Victoria Miro became another crucial supporter.

On the publishing side, Frieze magazine launched in 1991, founded by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who would later create the Frieze Art Fair. The magazine embraced the YBAs from the start, providing intellectual context for work that mainstream critics often dismissed. Established publications like Art Monthly and Modern Painters retooled their coverage to address the new British art scene.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries, validated the movement by nominating multiple YBAs for the Turner Prize and acquiring their work for the national collection. Critics Richard Cork, Louisa Buck, and Sarah Kent provided favorable coverage. An entire infrastructure developed to support, explain, and sell this work.

The Backlash

Not everyone was convinced.

Brian Sewell, art critic for the Evening Standard, waged a decades-long campaign against what he saw as pretentious nonsense. His reviews dripped with contempt. David Lee, editor of the Jackdaw newsletter, was equally hostile. The playwright Tom Stoppard made public denunciations.

In 1999, an oppositional movement emerged: the Stuckists, co-founded by Billy Childish, who happened to be Tracey Emin's ex-boyfriend. The Stuckists championed figurative painting against what they saw as the shallow conceptualism of the YBAs. They staged demonstrations outside Turner Prize ceremonies, carrying signs reading "The Stuckists Against the Turner Prize."

The conductor Sir Simon Rattle criticized the movement in 2002, drawing accusations that he didn't understand conceptual art. Rolf Harris, the television presenter and painter—later disgraced for unrelated crimes—called Emin's My Bed "a con."

Some criticisms cut deeper than mere dislike. The writer James Heartfield argued that the 1990s art boom "encouraged sloppiness. The Young British Artists preferred the inspired gesture to patient work. They added public outrage to their palettes, only to find that it faded very quickly."

The satirical magazine Private Eye ran a regular cartoon strip called "Young British Artists," mocking the scene's pretensions and commercial calculations.

The Question of Gender

Though Tracey Emin became one of the movement's most famous figures, the YBAs were predominantly male, and female artists often received less attention and lower prices than their male peers.

Sarah Lucas confronted gender directly in her work, creating crude sculptural figures from mattresses, stockings, and food that addressed sexuality with aggressive humor. Jenny Saville painted monumental images of female flesh, bodies that refused idealization. Rachel Whiteread's subtle, poetic work about absence and memory stood in quiet contrast to the loud provocations of Hirst and the Chapmans.

Yet in media coverage and market valuations, these artists remained secondary. Hirst's shark sold for millions; Whiteread's House was demolished. The art world's gender imbalances persisted even within a movement that claimed to be revolutionary.

After the Party

By the mid-2000s, the YBA moment had passed.

The term itself became awkward—these weren't young artists anymore. Most had been born in the mid-1960s; by 2005 they were approaching fifty. Some continued to produce significant work. Others became establishment figures themselves, elected to the Royal Academy that had once seemed like enemy territory. Gary Hume became a Royal Academician in 2001, Fiona Rae in 2002, Tracey Emin in 2007.

In 2004, a fire at a storage warehouse destroyed major works from the Saatchi collection, including the Chapman Brothers' Hell and Emin's famous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995—an appliquéd tent bearing the names of everyone she had literally slept with, from lovers to her grandmother to her aborted fetuses.

In 2008, Angus Fairhurst, one of the original Goldsmiths cohort and a close friend of Hirst's, died by suicide. He had been struggling with depression and had become increasingly peripheral as his former classmates achieved fame.

Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, said in 2009: "The YBA moment is definitely now dead, but anyone who thinks they were a cut-off point is wrong. They began something which has continued to grow ever since."

What Remains

So what did they actually accomplish?

They proved that British contemporary art could compete on the global stage. Before the YBAs, London was an art world backwater compared to New York. After them, it became a major center, with collectors, galleries, and institutions to rival any city.

They demonstrated that artists could control their own careers. The DIY ethos of Freeze—organizing your own shows, creating your own context—became standard practice. Artist-run spaces proliferated. The line between artist and entrepreneur blurred.

They made contemporary art a mass-media phenomenon. Whatever you think of the work, the Turner Prize became must-see television. Newspapers covered art openings like movie premieres. Art became cultural conversation in a way it hadn't been for decades.

And they created some genuinely powerful work. Whiteread's House remains a haunting meditation on absence and memory. Emin's confessional practice opened new territory for autobiography in art. Hirst's preserved animals, for all their circus-sideshow aspects, do make you think about death in visceral ways.

But they also raised questions that haven't been answered. When shock becomes expected, does it lose its power? When provocation is rewarded by the market, is it still provocative? When artists become brands, what happens to the art?

The YBAs didn't invent these tensions—art has always negotiated the space between rebellion and commerce, between avant-garde and establishment. But they made those tensions visible in ways that still shape how we think about contemporary art today.

The shark still floats in its tank, preserved in formaldehyde, impossibly dead and impossibly present. It's become such a cliché of British art that it's hard to remember how strange it once seemed. Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what happens when the shock wears off and all that remains is the work itself, suspended in its vitrine, waiting to be seen.