Jonathan Meades

This history of the YBAs confirms their ahistoric arrogance and boundless incuriosity

Artrage by Elizabeth Fullerton.
Thames & Hudson. 288pp. £24.95

Thames & Hudson is no longer a publisher much associated with writing. You do not expect its books on art and applied art to be wrought with the brio and elegance of Susie Harries or Rosemary Hill, Crook or Summerson. Which is, perhaps, just as well because Elizabeth Fullerton’s text is catastrophically clumsy. According to the author note she graduated from Oxford with a degree in modern languages: one must assume that English was not among them. She can just about parse a sentence but beyond that, nothing – save a perennially tin ear, a relentless tide of clichés (sea change, game changer, elitist hierarchy of the fusty art world, national treasure, iconic, hotbed of radicalism, zeitgeisty, alienated modern lives), yesterday’s tired neologisms, a hundredweight of received ideas, unwitting mock heroism, ludicrously hyperbolic claims, a willingness to take some really rather stupid people at their own elevated estimate including the self-congratulatory collective of (once) Young British Artists or ‘artists’. These people did everything  mob-handed. They were forever ‘supporting’ each other with cultish zeal. They conned in numbers. They graduated from Goldsmiths where they seem to have been brainwashed by Michael Craig-Martin and Richard Wentworth.

We are told that Angus Fairhurst was a ‘towering intellect’ but are not vouchsafed any example of the heights he is supposed to have attained. Liam Gillick is described as ‘the group intellectual’, which seems to mean little more than that the poor fellow is fluent in International Art English, the witless jargon which is the staple of such borderline literate magazines such as Frieze, ARTnews, Art Monthly etc. Exclusion awaits those in the art world who do not write or converse in this clumsy sociolect (as they would have it) which is as far from slang as can be. Slang, as its greatest scholar Jonathon Green has noted, is ‘the poetry of the gutter’.

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