From Publishers Weekly
The controversial Sensation exhibition--which prompted irate New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to attempt to cut off city funding to the Brooklyn Museum--typifies a new wave of media-addled "Young British Artists" who buoyed up to the surface this decade. Oxford art historian Stallabrass attempts an unmasking of their work as "high art lite," incisively arguing that most of it is neither formally innovative nor conceptually rich, and that many pieces owe their popularity and indeed their very existence to the ministrations of the art's major collector--British ad mogul Charles Saatchi. In a series of subtle, scholarly looks, Stallabrass (Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture) finds the work spiked with Dada, relentlessly up-to-date pop-cultural references and elements of minimalism and conceptual art, but nothing that reconceptualizes or surpasses the original uses of these modes by their (mostly American) innovators. He gives detailed but engaging analyses of attendance figures at the Saatchi collection-based Sensation, which began its world tour at the Royal Academy in London (where it caused similar controversy), and makes a strong case that the museum played into Saatchi's hands. (A museum's imprimatur greatly increases a collection's value.) With nearly 80 full-color reproductions of works by artists like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dino Chapman and Sam Taylor-Wood, the book neatly encapsulates the controversy surrounding their seemingly debased qualities, albeit from a British perspective. Stallabrass, as a veteran of British art journalism, writes compellingly and with a wide-ranging historical sense; readers will find such cogent contextualization essential to an often overheated debate. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Stallabrass, a writer, art critic, and art history professor, takes a close look at the movement he dubs "high art lite" (also known as Young British Art) that has developed in Britain over the past decade. The movement, which recently garnered headlines in the United States after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to defund the Brooklyn Museum of Art for showing "Sensation." That exhibition, as well as many of its artists, is discussed in great detail in Stallabrass's witty, informative, and sometimes searing discussion of the movement and its primary players. Unwilling to be a mouthpiece for the more extreme--and at the same time banal--practitioners, Stallabrass is able to delineate clearly the best work of the group of artists while at the same time skewering the world of art criticism that all too often considers itself more important than the works themselves. As interest generated by the "Sensation" exhibition will likely be waning, this work will be valuable primarily to those collections with a strong focus on contemporary art.
-Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
