Dinos Chapman was born in London in 1962 and Jake Chapman was born in Cheltenham in 1966. They both graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1990 and began working together shortly afterwards. The Chapmans weave a vast range of associations into their work, using material from all areas of the cultural landscape including philosophical theory, art history and consumer culture. They engage with inflammatory subjects and use subversive strategies to produce works that defiantly refute straightforward interpretation.

Over the years, the work of Dinos and Jake Chapman has caused some bewilderment. Take Fucking Hell, a compilation of 30,000 mutilated plastic soldiers arranged in the shape of a giant swastika (the centrepiece of the Royal Academy's Apocalypse show).

Then there was the set of life-sized nude mannequins with sexual organs for faces; and the three-dimensional version of Goya's Disasters of War, which included multiple decapitations and manglings. The brothers' contribution to the opening exhibition of the Tate Modern at Bankside, on the other hand, depicted a hammer through a brain, connected to a limp male organ. (The Queen was gently steered away from it at the official opening.)

They deny that their intention is to shock, but their work resonates with a clear desire to do so. And - in an industry in which a lot of people are struggling to do the same thing - it's paid off. Sylvester Stallone is a fan; Charles Saatchi paid £500,000 for Fucking Hell; they are represented by the unimpeachably fashionable London gallery, White Cube - a new show opens this week - and, over the past 10 years, they have gained enough column inches to make a giant papier-mache penis. Any discussion of their work is difficult, as they dismiss most of my questions as "reductive", "not mystical" or "inappropriate". They clearly have little esteem for their audience, and have suggested the public should be "means tested" for intellectual suitability to view their work: "Galleries should not seek to be redemptible spaces for bourgeois people to pay their dues to culture," explains Jake. "Some people need to be alienated."

He denies, however, that their intention is simply to make people recoil: "Nothing in a gallery is repulsive. There should not be an assumption that art should idealise people's lives. Some people might have problems with a composition of genitalia, but sometimes shock is merely a Pavlovian response."

"We're not irreverent," adds Dinos. "Our work is only irreverent in that it allows certain people a little frisson."

They are, however, skilled draughtsmen, as evidenced in Disasters of War, a recently published book containing 83 of their hand-painted etchings, which were inspired by Goya's prints of the same title (the book is a highlight of this weekend's Artists Book Fair at the London Institute).

Each image is executed in painstaking detail, and most are fairly arresting: one picture features a cluster of bodies, beneath the caption: "Look. 36 penises, 16 vaginas, 6 anuses. It must be a girl!"; another shows a penis-like finger gouging an eye, while a few pages on you find a large insect balanced on a testicle and a man gorging on a human limb.
The etchings were made in 1999 and quickly sold out. Priced at £15,000, complete sets in black-and-white were bought by institutions such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Wherever their inspiration lies, it does not seem to be in art. They cannot name a painter they like, and appear to hold most in disdain: Francis Bacon's work is "retarded 1950's English existentialism"; Freud's is a "drab kitchen-sink drama"; the National Gallery is "full of rubbish" except, perhaps, for the Goyas, which are "quite good for a deaf Spanishman".

The brothers' enthusiasm for information has limits: they deflect personal questions with convoluted art-speak. Their father was an art teacher, their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot; they were brought up in Cheltenham; moved to Hastings where they attended a local comprehensive; enrolled at the Royal College of Art ("shit", "a complete waste of time" and "full of people tickling oil paint around"); and started working together soon after graduating.

"We're not joined at the hip," explains Jake. "Our lives are very different. We didn't merge our work because we were brothers. We did it because our ideas converged." They say they would consider going their own ways only "if things get boring".

For the moment, they appear settled. Dinos lives with a textile designer and has two children who "play an active part in taking on the misanthropic lineage"; Jake has a girlfriend; and both remain resolutely loyal to each other: "I make my work for Dinos and Dinos makes his for me," explains Jake.

"That's right," says Dinos. "We work for each other." They have a wider audience and - though they can charge upwards of £30,000 for one piece - are airily dismissive about money: "We are not idealistic about the world," says Jake. "It's a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated."

It was touch and go whether they would make it big, even after the shock success of "Sensation".

Then the Royal Academy followed this with "Apocalypse" in 2000, at which the brothers' massive sculpture Hell was displayed.

"I remember going to see it in their studio," says artist Anthony Green, a Royal Academician and a judge of this year's Charles Wollaston Award, "and thinking we had to have it in the Academy immediately. I think it is still one of the most important figurative contemporary sculptures in the world."

The work's controversial depiction of a nightmarish world on the brink of collapse, with its 5,000 Nazi-costumed figurines in various stages of brutal murder and cannibalism, was too strong for some. But, as Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary, points out: "You had to admire how exceptionally well-made it was. This is the central paradox of their work - it focuses on very brutal things but is so beautifully made. Their work is anti- art while playing on its own aesthetics. It's evidence of a very learned, very intelligent strategy."

The brothers say that they revel in their own pessimism and their work's misanthropy. But what interests them most is distorting the idea of perfection. "There's this general assumption made about art today that there's been this shift from technical skill to a philosophical skill, that the idea is more important than the production of the work," says Jake. "We think we're more conceptual in that we also drag the notion of skill right into the centre of the debate." And this, from the artists who, the tabloids were saying, had just won a prize for something that looked like a pile of clay.

The question, when faced again with angry little Fuckface, and the empty-eyed girl dolls of Two-faced Cunt, joined at the cheek with a vagina, remains a valid one. The Chapman brothers offer an answer of sorts in the title of their show: this is 'bad art for bad people'. Are we all doomed?

Yes and no. More yes than no: it largely depends on what timescale you're using. If you mean "Are we doomed to the local death that awaits us personally?" then yes, were doomed. If you mean "Are we doomed to the imminent soar heat death that awaits us generally?" then yes, were doomed. However, if we accept both of these events as fundamental conditions of existence, then no, were not doomed.

Does art make a difference?

Yes and no. More no than yes. If you mean "Does it make the world a better place?" then no. But if you mean "Does it make the world a different place?" then yes.

If Tracey Emin is the queen and Damien Hirst the knave, Jake and Dinos Chapman are the two maniacal jokers of the Britart pack. From their child-adult mannequins adorned with lurid pink genitalia to their most recent riff on American pop culture as ancient ethnographic art (as though Bart Simpson and McDonald's were recently unearthed by Time Team), the Chapmans specialise in deep black comedy and provocatively deadpan parody. If they weren't so media friendly (and cute), they'd be the Chris Morris of the British art world.

Notoriety nevertheless sealed, and later given the stamp of approval by the Royal Academy (the Chapmans featured in both Sensation and the 2000 exhibition Apocalypse), Jake and Dinos continued to plough a rich vein of subversive and terrific humour, much of it rooted in a thorough understanding and knowledge of art history - they're smart, these brothers - referencing works not only by Goya and Bosch, but by Rodin, Blake, Poussin and in the case of Ubermensch, a 1995 sculpture of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair perched perilously atop a craggy outcrop of rock, Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. Ubermensch  said of them, cringe-making, funny, clever, and revelling in its fantastic bad taste.

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.

How to clean paintings on the cheap!
Some of the older paintings need to be cleaned since the colours are not as bright anymore. If they're not like museum quality and you just want to keep them clean. We can suggest a way to clean them without hurting the paint? If you don't think you will be able to afford professional cleaning, you can wipe clean an acrylic painting with a damped cloth? As it is basically a plastic or latex type media I would think you could use warm water with just a couple of drops of dish detergent or a slight amount of TSP(trisodiumphosphate) and wipe with a soft dampened cloth, and then finish wiping with a clear water dampened cloth. As far as oil paintings, it is more complex. Various solvents are used depending upon the surface condition, whether it is varnished or not, etc. I would not advise cleaning these without a conservator. Paintings with a wax medium are even more tricky.

Chapman Brothers fuck face painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

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Chapman Brothers Doggy style painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

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