So it’s goodbye Cornelissens hello Halfords. Laura Gascoigne parks her brush and tries to follow the instructions for flatpack art, but has the picture upside down It’s a dull job being a customs officer, sitting on the border twiddling your thumbs until the next teenage drugs mule comes along. So it must have added to… Continue reading Sense and Sensibility
Tag: YBA
Overkill: art rising from the dead
Things have gone rather quiet on the mortality front since queues stretched around the White Cube block in Mason’s Yard for a sight of Damien Hirst’s £50m sculpture For the Love of God. In those days of skulls and diamonds, Paul Wilks wrote a letter to The Jackdaw lamenting the morbidity of contemporary art, wondering… Continue reading Overkill: art rising from the dead
The way we are now – why ‘avant garde’ is now an obsolete term
The Times – God bless its little cotton socks – has just been celebrating the triumphal return of the 1990s as a creative force. “Suddenly contemporary art” it crows, “was part of popular culture. The Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show in 1997 was a turning point.” It was so indeed, but not exactly in the… Continue reading The way we are now – why ‘avant garde’ is now an obsolete term
1988 … Year zero
… when branding and art formed a marriage of convenience, argues artist John Kelly. 1988 is the seminal year, the year that our concepts of art, money and values changed irredeemably. It was the year I came to London as a 23-year-old artist, having taken an opportunity to play league cricket in London. It was… Continue reading 1988 … Year zero