A few things I wanted to share about the yBa movement.
Apparently it all started in the 80s-90s with a few artist sponsored by Charles Saatchi. They became famous after a few won the Turner price (at a time where the price was itself hypermediatised having been endorsed by channel four). It was also a period categorised in my opinion by the rise of ostentation as the main driver to society - ie MTV blingbling culture, 'affordable' luxury and pop up celebrity. Furthermore, with with the end of communism (1989 putting an end to the petrol choc of the 70s) marked by the progressive disappearance of industrial jobs, manual workers were replaced by urban white collar office workers and the dominant social values shifted with them. Fashion, aesthetics and appearance become drivers of social status and social appurtenance blurred further. Trends and ideas “trickled up” from the masses rather than trickle down from 'the rich' - ie, MTV, the rise of 'social media', reality TV and wide diffusion of 'branding'. These can be seen as causes as well as consequences of the social changes of that time. Trends evolved unpredictably from small groups of forward thinkers before they diffuse into society at large. As such, influencers, viral marketing and endorsement become superior to merit and intrinsic values. To put it simply, society was shifting and values such as appearance, immediate pleasure and riches were taking the upper hand. Of course in such a context branding and marketing came to dominate our perceptions.
In addition, the end of manual labour (following 100 years later the disappearance of agricultural work), and the suppression of social structure surrounding it (owners, proletariat, liberals) led to a deterioration of sense of belonging. This is still today visible and actual in areas, which haven't recovered from the 'desindustrialisation'. Social interactions are consequently less and less codified (no more is hard work a value) and more and more dictated by openly fake ostentatious behaviour. People have been confronted with some form of crisis of identity. In rejection to the fakeness, youth have turned to stylised violent expressions of themselves inspired by the Punks a decade earlier: jackass, graffiti, Fight Club, raving (indistinct masses moving to unified beats with no leader or social organisation, on drugs which suppress social awkwardness and barriers) are just examples of this mediatique counter culture. It is in that context that the yBa have rised and changed art.
Below the key artists of the movement:
Damien Hirst
This piece is what made the yBa (a bunch of friends from Goldsmoth art school). This was the first peace, which was bought by Saatchi. A bit of back ground on Saatchi...Saatchi is the co-founder of Saatchi-Saatchi, the largest advertising agency in the world. They were successful at marketing cigarettes, and getting Margaret Thatcher into office.
Damien Hirst who was very entrepreneurial and dynamic in the promotion of his work organised several shows and exhibitions. One of the most successful ones is Freeze, which he started in 1988 and which is now one of the world most important fairs for contemporary art. It is at one of these shows that Charles Saatchi, which was and still is an influential collector, discovered his work and started buying loads of it!
Marc Quinn
Quinn has used blood, ice and faeces to make sculptures; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments. Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual.
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| Planet (2008) |
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| Waiting for Godot |
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| Siren |
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| Sky (2006) Human Placenta, umbilical cord, stainless steelm perspex and refrigeration equipment (205 x 65 x 65 cm) |
His White Cube profile describes:
He regards art as a concrete philosophy and his motif world explores the major issues of life and death, gender and transformation, identity, and the icons of our contemporary world. Indeed, Kate Moss doing yoga poses in solid gold statue is exactly that! haha
Fiona Rae
The Timothy Taylor Gallery describes: Employing a battery of painterly marks, graphic signs and symbols, her paintings explore the profusion of our visual and material culture and take us on an exhilarating ride through the possibilities of paint. The paintings seem to suggest the seductions, contradictions and disappointments of contemporary life and culture.
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| Who is peeping there? - 152.4x127cm |
Henry Bond:
Bond's visual art tends to appropriation and pastiche; he has exhibited work made collaboratively with YBA artists, In 1998, his photobook of street fashions in London The Cult of the Street was published. His Point and Shoot(Cantz, 2000), explored the photo-genres of surveillance, voyeurism and paparazzi photojournalism.
Lacan at the Scene is a work of non-fiction by Henry Bond, published in 2009 by the MIT Press. The book consists of interpretations of forensic photographs from twenty-one crime scenes from 1950s and 1960s England.[11] The thesis put forward in the book is that homicide can be considered in terms of Lacan's tripartite psychological model, thus any murder can be classified as either neurotic, psychotic, or perverse.[12] Bond's approach is closely linked to Walter Benjamin's assertion that, "photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."
Street photography
A characteristic of Bond's style is his pastiche and appropriation of familiar types of photograph, for example, Ben Seymour said, "Bond carries on producing images of a homogenised, outside-less culture in a perpetual present of consumption which may be just ahead of, or self-consciously behind - but always deliberately in between - the conventions of advertising, fashion, surveillance or family photographs."[24] Bond has also considered his work in relation to the dérive - literally: "drifting" - theorised by Guy Debord and the city walks of the flâneur orpsychogeographer.
In 2002, a group of large-scale printed examples from The Cult of the Street were included in theBarbican Centre survey Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970.
Tracey Emin
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| I've got it all |
In the 90s, running The Shop in East London with friend and artist Sarah Lucas, continuing entrepreneurial spirit, Emin invited friends, collectors, and dealers to ‘invest’ in her creative potential. In the following years Emin had her first exhibition entitled ‘My Major Retrospective’ (1993), at White Cube gallery. These exhibitions established Emin’s willingness to make works of art that take as their starting points the most intimate details of her personal history. Sometimes confrontational or sexually provocative, Emin’s work resonates with the ‘personal is political’ legacy of feminist art while at the same time maintaining a universal accessibility that speaks to relationships in general. Her works also relate more broadly to issues of spirituality, cultural identity, class, and celebrity.
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| Black cat |
The Chapman brothers
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| Death |
Their subject matter tends to concentrate on whatever is generally deemed to be appalling, vulgar, offensive, etc.—including, in 2008, a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by Adolf Hitler.The Chapman brothers continued the theme of anatomical and pornographic grotesque with a series of mannequins of children, sometimes fused together, with genitalia in place of facial features. An early piece consisted of eighty-three scenes oftorture and disfigurement similar to those recorded by Francisco Goya in his series of etchings,The Disasters of War (a work they later returned to) rendered into small three-dimensional plastic models. the Chapmans held a solo show at Modern Art Oxford entitled The Rape of Creativity in which "the enfants terribles" of Britart, bought a mint collection of Goya's most celebrated prints - and set about systematically defacing them". The Daily Telegraph commented that the Chapman brothers had "managed to raise the hackles of art historians by violating something much more sacred to the art world than the human body - another work of art", they also noted that the effect of their work was powerful. 
The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003. As well as including Insult to Injury, their Turner Prize exhibit debuted two new works Sex and Death. Sex directly referenced their previous work Great Deeds against the Dead. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree, Sex shows the same scenario, but in a heightened state of decay. Additionally clown's noses are now present on the skulls of the corpses; snakes, rats and insects (like those found in joke shops) cover the piece. In 2007, they were criticised by journalist Johann Hari for adopting an anti-Enlightenment philosophy.
In conclusion... there is meaning in the above, but is it art? I liked the sentence we read about HIrst: "At its best, Hirst's art makes us apprehend more keenly what it is to be embodied, to be feeling threatened by horrific vulnerabilities of other bodies as much as our own. This is the substantial import of his art's continued fascination with the gruesome but austerely beautiful precincts of the morgue, abattoir, the laboratory and the operating theatre." "What Hirst conjures frequently is a 'shock' that is actually closer to the medical sense of the word than the moral or aesthetic (...) a general suppression or weakening of the body's normal function. " 
It is interesting in my opinion to see this art in light of our society, and what we now call art. Art to me has always been more social philosophy. In that perspective, what the YBA have achieved is very good art, as they have managed to resonate with our times and stir emotions and ideas. They are also in a sense creative, even if they weren't the first ones to sublime the ugly and the provocative. One of my favorite art periods is the dadaist movement (Marcel Duchamp amongst them all). "Of Duchamp's pieces, critic Guillaume Apollinaire--who was to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's very ugly nudes." Duchamp also became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d' Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and 'high' living."
This was 100 years ago, in other period categorized by loss of identity brought by the wide spread of industrialisation and mecanisation which is alienating labour. and of course world war I. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. It is a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
Back to the yBa, there movement is also categorised by anti-art, and they also embody a feeling, which might not be honourable, at least has the virtue of being powerful and communicative. They contributed in redifining art, in a period that follows pop art, conceptual art and other low grade art movements (graffiti, design, Op art or neo-any previous art movement).
"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. It's not over."
On the other hand... "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."
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