This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Twenty-five years ago, in the autumn of 1997, a selection of works from the collection of Charles Saatchi was put on display at the Royal Academy in London. Ahead of the exhibition, the RA warned visitors that there would be works on view “which some people may find distasteful. Parents should exercise their judgement in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18.” The notice may have been meant with the best of intentions but it was an irresistible come-on too.

They are still figures who command attention and whose work has come-hither appeal to a certain type of collector

And come-on people did; 300,000 visitors attended Sensation in a little over three months, some of them art fanciers. Many, however, were there simply to see what the fuss was about, drawn by the delightedly appalled response of broadcasters and the newspapers — then still an influential medium — to a collection of exhibits that included mannequins with penises for noses and a head composed of frozen human blood.

It was the show that announced the arrival of the Young British Artists — a heterogenous group united by no style, theme or ethos but by a shared irreverence and a highly-developed media savviness. Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s phallic and anal dummies turned their creators into celebrities — a status they bibulously embraced — and they have remained more than just artists ever since.

The YBAs are now all middle-aged. Hirst is 57, Emin 59, the Chapmans 56 and 60 respectively, and the years have been kind to them. They are still figures who command attention and whose work has come-hither appeal to a certain type of collector. Not all the artists have fared as well, of course: there were 42 of them represented at Sensation and many remain a niche interest. Adam Chodzko, Abigail Lane and Richard Patterson, for example, never attracted a fraction of the attention hoovered up by the more vocal YBAs, while other Saatchi artists less affiliated with the group — the likes of Paul Finnegan, Alain Miller and Hadrian Piggott — ply their trade out of the spotlight.

Twenty-five years though is long enough to take a punt at which of the Sensation artists took their work on and outlived the fuss around the exhibition — and which haven’t. Rachel Whiteread has turned her casts of the spaces around or inside objects into potent and sometimes haunting symbols, a method that culminated in her Holocaust Monument in Vienna — an inside-out library whose concrete book spines represent 65,000 lost Jewish lives.

The British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has found a non-modish way of combining his two cultures by using European artistic motifs with West African Ankara fabric. While Gavin Turk and Ron Mueck have also shown their artistic chops.

The most significant of them, however, is Jenny Saville, whose paintings of naked women are monumental, regardless of whether the canvases themselves are small or huge. Her unsparing works of close-up flesh are intelligent and skilled contributions to the old debates about the nude and idealised female beauty. The market is not always the best judge of merit but when in 2018 her seated nude self-portrait Propped made £9.5 million at auction no one questioned the sum.

The case is different with both Hirst and Emin. If the lure of their names fails to keep their work alive it is hard to believe any intrinsic artistic merit will. For all their shock value, Hirst’s formaldehyde shark and cows were valid iterations of the questions of life and death with which art has always been concerned — but commerce proved more appealing to him.

An ill-advised show of maladroit, sub-Bacon paintings at the Wallace Collection in 2009 showed Hirst’s very real
limitations and he quickly descended into mere money spinning, churning out — or paying others to churn out on his behalf — anodyne butterfly and dot paintings for keen-to-be chic walls. His latest foray, into NFTs, shows his financial acumen and Barnum skills but no artistic progression.

Emin, on the other hand, takes her art, and herself, more seriously — sometimes to the point of incomprehension: “Being an artist and having to be responsible for the art that you make is really quite challenging,” she says. But she too is reliant on 25-year-old glories.

Hirst and Emin will likely be seen as little more than representatives of a brief cultural moment

The autobiographical exposure that some people found so bracingly scarifying in her early work turned into mere solipsism — with wobbly drawings and splashy paintings evidence of expression outrunning technique and cracker-barrel slogans in neon light (“You touch my soul”) attempting to endow kitsch with psychological heft.

During the febrile response to Sensation, one painting in particular bore the brunt of the abuse — Marcus Harvey’s Myra, the 11-foot canvas on which the mugshot of the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley was reproduced using children’s handprints.

Both the mother of one of the murder victims and Hindley herself demanded its removal and the picture was vandalised twice on the opening day of the exhibition.

It disappeared from view when it was sold by Saatchi in 2006 to an American commodities trader called Frank Gallipoli.

Harvey meanwhile has subsequently made nothing to match it for impact. In another twenty-five years, when Sensation is remembered again, Hirst and Emin will likely be seen as little more than representatives of a brief cultural moment, but Harvey’s picture might finally be appreciated for its profundity and as a grave, appropriate and innovative response to human depravity.