The nineties movement that acquired the acronym YBA—Young British Artists—led by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread and Marc Quinn, has been widely credited not only with putting UK output at the centre of the international art market, but bringing a new generation of viewers into galleries, and revitalizing public debate about the visual arts. Admirers have argued that these artists—wittily deriding decades of late modernist orthodoxy and more recent postmodern postures—have reconnected the fine arts to popular culture with new styles of narrative and direct human address. Critics, on the other hand, have alleged that the movement consists of little more than chic nihilism clad in the profitable outer-wear of high art. With some caveats, Julian Stallabrass is firmly in the latter camp, as the caustic title of his book suggests. High Art Lite is a sustained and withering assault—comprehensively illustrated, save for blanks where an artist’s agent has seen fit to protect his client’s images from comment—on the credentials of the YBA phenomenon. Lacking either intellectual rigour or social concern, this is a movement with a void at its centre. Though Stallabrass writes as a Marxist, here he finds himself in partial agreement with conservative critics like Brian Sewell, who also point to a gaping hole in this art, but who are more likely to define what is missing as tradition, spiritual weight, craft and aesthetic integrity.
An absence, of course, need not in itself be aesthetically disabling. In contemplating the abyss that opened up after the rupture of modernism, writers like Beckett or Ashbery have produced masterpieces. Ashbery’s finest poems—among them, ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’—are moving meditations on the spiritual oddity and agony of a postmodern predicament, lines whose profundity is wrested from the absence of possibility of the profound. Many of the YBAs might agree that there is this kind of void, and indeed contend that it is the very object of their work. Emin’s celebrated unmade bed could be taken as the image of a condition in which only the literal detritus of the personal is now available as material for art. Hirst’s various animal experiments are virtually unmediated representations of the banal carnality of existence: what you see is what you get —mess, decomposition and death.
Plainly, however, there is a difference between commercial exploitation and aesthetic exploration of any experience, individual or collective. Stallabrass’s explanation of that is Marxist, but one does not have to accept it to concur with his analysis of the hype and trivia of HAL. His account centres on the peculiar predicament of the visual arts after the ordeal of deconstruction. ‘This critical dismantling’, he writes, ‘has been continuing for decades’, to the point where it is often ‘hard to know with what level of reference we are dealing: is a work referring to something else or itself, to rhetoric or reference, or to some still further recursion?’ Ever since Marcel Duchamp’s brilliantly knowing games, a persistent strand in the visual arts has been successive subversions of the art object, first as art and then as object. A Duchamp ready-made—urinal, hat stand, bottle rack—undermined every category of form or meaning with the satirical paradox: this is art because I, as artist, designate it as such, for display in a gallery—to ask for more is bad faith. But the gesture is unrepeatable, because a second urinal implies an appeal to precedent, inseparable from a reinstatement of meaning or form, since the subsequent piece now takes its place in a tradition—another realm of signification, to which the work refers. But this realm was what the original was created to exclude. In this sense, subversion reiterated subverts itself, returning the artist to square one.