Young British Artists or YBAs (also Brit artists and Britart) is the name given to a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the UK. The term Young British Artists is derived from shows of that name staged at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 onwards, which brought the artists to fame. It has become an historic term, as most of the YBAs are now in their forties. They are noted for "shock tactics", use of throwaway materials and wild-living, and are (or were) associated with the Hoxton area of East London. They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990's

The legendary 1988 Damien Hirst curated exhibition that gave birth to Young British Art, and Tate Britain's recent "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," a show that signalled both the phenomenon's institutional apotheosis and, for many, its creative swan song.

A three-way collaboration between Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Angus Fairhurst,

Full of gaily coloured fish, spooky animatronics, crucifixions, various sexual organs and body parts, large animals, and larger numbers of squashed or imprisoned insects. In March 1992, Hirst showed his infamous tiger-shark-in-a-tank, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, at the Saatchi Gallery, and this piece, accompanied by intensive media coverage, projected him for the first time beyond an art audience onto a public stage. The Turner Prize, whose purse had doubled under new sponsorship by the British television station Channel Four, shifted its generational focus. Rachel Whiteread in 1993, Damien Hirst in 1995.

Channel Four's affiliation with the prize was a crucial factor in the dissemination of this new art to a broader public. The second crucial factor was Charles Saatchi's sudden enthusiasm for collecting emerging British art. He laid out his goods in five exhibitions between March 1992 and December 1995: "Young British Artists" I, II, III, IV, and V. Saatchi's title, remembers curator Gregor Muir, became abbreviated in the curatorial discussions leading to "General Release," the British Council's national survey for the 1995 Venice Biennale--and from then on entered the lexicon as "YBA." In 1995 and 1996, as British group shows proliferated around the world--in Minneapolis, Venice, Houston, Copenhagen, Rome, Wolfsburg, Baden Baden, Sydney, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Paris, and Tokyo--the acronym was so widely applied that at moments it denoted no more than "young(ish)" and "making art in Britain."

While Hirst learned his artistic presentation skills from Koons and Haim Steinbach (his aquariums and cabinets are on one level simply enlarged variations of their vitrines and shelves, respectively), he also recognized in Koons the value of a branded artistic identity (a notion reinforced by the careers of both Georg Baselitz and Gilbert & George, which Hirst observed firsthand working at Anthony d'Offay Gallery while in art school). This is explicit by 1996 when he describes, in Modern Painters, his spot and spin paintings as "almost like a logo as an idea of myself as an artist." But where Koons--and, of course, Koons's role model, Warhol--both critiqued and participated in the mass media's construction of celebrity by using the media simultaneously as a central subject of his art and as a promotional vehicle, with Hirst, and later with Tracey Emin, no comparable conceptual interchange between the media and the art occurs. Instead, Hirst courted the media one-dimensionally to generate a cult of personality, while encouraging journalists to depict his artistic persona as (schizo-phrenically) alternative and avant-garde, as well as glamorous and aspirational. Hirst hagiographer Gordon Burn, for example, could write romantically of the millionaire, restaurant-owning pop-impresario artist in The Guardian as late as April 2000 that "he has always used drugs and drink as a way of isolating himself from banal experience and to bring him to something original or extraordinary in the moment that nobody else can see."

Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" at the Royal Academy whipped up yet another media storm to lodge the phenomenon seemingly ever more firmly into national public consciousness. Tracey Emin's coming-of-age as the public's favourite artist--her place in the nation's affections secured by Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995, the tent (destroyed in the Momart fire) appliqued with dedications to her lovers, her brother, a grandmother, a teddy bear, and her aborted fetus--and new Saatchi finds like Ron Mueck and his uncanny Dead Dad, 1996-97, created added media value. The debacle over Harvey's vandalized painting was matched in volume only by mayor Rudolph Giuliani's loudly offended sensibilities on another side of the Atlantic, as the show arrived in Brooklyn in October 1999. But by 1998 even the Saatchi machine recognized that the media's fascination could not be held forever, and there was a short-lived attempt to manufacture a new "movement" centred on the group of artists that Martin Maloney had gathered in South London at his apartment-cum-gallery Lost in Space. So-called New Neurotic Realists like Peter Davies, Dexter Dalwood, and Luke Gottelier substituted YBA's highly produced spectacle for a homespun aesthetic, offbeat subjects, and a more modest demeanour, but without, unsurprisingly, garnering much attention from the mainstream press. The opening of the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall in 2003 generated flurries of coverage, particularly when a whiff of competition was scented between Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the Tate director. But now that the space--hovering above the riverside's hot-dog stands and amusement arcades--has evolved into a visitor attraction more akin to its neighbors the London Aquarium and Dali Universe than to the cool and cultural Tate Modern, the media is relatively subdued.
At the same time, the British economy was experiencing a booming consumer culture in the wake of the 1989-91 recession. The press, chasing advertisers, began to fill its pages with "lifestyle" journalism rather than consumer-unfriendly news--and natural self-publicists like Hirst and Emin were close at hand. Hirst's multifarious activities--his music videos, his restaurants, his record covers, his product design--appeared, for a moment, to signal a radical disruption of art's specialized terrain. But when stores like Habitat and Selfridges recognized the consumer advantage in affiliating themselves with the new British art, the symbiosis between commerce and culture deepened until, as Simon Ford concluded, "the art becomes inseparable from the products it is helping to sell--the floor coverings and furnishings, the restaurants and clubs." Rather than reflect on consumer society, as Pop art did, YBA became an aspect of it.

The Young British Artists from an early stage were more socially than aesthetically connected. Sarah Lucus has had relationships with, in turn, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Angust Fairhuest. Gillian Wearing had relationships with Michael Land. Tracey Emin had a relationship with Mat Collishaw. Fiona Rae dated Stephen Park  for several years, and then Richard Patterson for a similar duration. Sam Taylor-Wood has dated to Gary Hume, Jake Chapman and is currently linked to Jay Jopling. Places where it would be possible to spot YBAs included the Groucho Club, St. John (a restaurant specialising in offal) and (in the early years) pubs around Hoxton, such as the Bricklayer's Arms. Hoxton is known as the heartland of conceptual art (i.e. Britart).

Charles Saatchi's collection of young British artists is one of the most celebrated collections of contemporary art in the world. "But is it art?" was a frequent cry during the mid-90s, when he exhibited the works of artists such as Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and Marcus Harvey. Artists such as these soon fulfilled their promise and consolidated their reputations, vindicating Saatchi's enthusiasm and their inclusion in this eclectic group.

One thing is certain: the majority of artists in Freeze, along with others using similar strategies for making and mediating art, have come to dominate the British art scene. Moreover, many have made a considerable impact on both sides of the Atlantic and further afield. Whatever happens next, these artists can no more be written out of the art history books than can the Pre-Raphaelites, the Vorticists, the Camden Town Group-or, nearer our own day, the British Pop artists or the new sculptors of the 1960s and the 1970s, many of whom are still prominent.
Art arises out of previous art and recent generations serve as inspiration to new work, which none the less has very different, more contemporary concerns. But as far as international reputation is concerned, it appears that the latest new generation of British artists is having considerably more impact than its predecessors. British art, even since Henry Moore, has always appeared to itself and to the outside world to be a little behind, lacking the innovation that is central to modern art. It was for that reason tinged with a certain indefinable, if attractive, provinciality. This is clearly no longer the case. Or is it? Perhaps one of the questions this exhibition will answer is precisely that-whether art in Britain, never quite central to the European cultural experience, nor quite radical in terms of the great American art experiment that commenced with Jackson Pollock, can now hold its own as second to none. Can London become the unchallenged centre for contemporary art? In the past, Paris, New York and even Dosseldorf have been able to claim this role. If London could now claim such a position, that would be grounds for celebration.

What is so new about the art in Sensation? Why has this art had such a public resonance, unparalleled in this country since the arrival of the Pop generation, many of whom are now distinguished members of the Royal Academy? The answer lies in this generation's new and radical attitude to realism, or rather to reality and real life itself. They combine this with a complex knowledge of recent art developments in Britain and abroad, which they ambitiously wish to challenge and extend. A visitor to this exhibition with an open mind will perceive an uncommonly clear mirror of contemporary obsessions. Presented with both seriousness and humour (often black), and in an extraordinary diversity of materials and approaches, these works serve as memorable metaphors for many problems of our times, some of which are shocking. But why were Manet's Olympia and the Dojeuner sur l'herbe such an outrage to contemporaries? Because by taking themes and compositions that had acquired the respectability of tradition-in his case from the Renaissance-Manet drew attention to contemporary problems. He did so with refinement, but also with naked sensation every bit as attention-grabbing as that of his contemporary novelists or political commentators.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

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