High Art Lite - Hardcover

Stallabrass, Julian

3.82

111 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859847218 ISBN 13: 9781859847213

Publisher: Verso, 2000

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The recent controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Sensation! Show has further inflated the already burgeoning media profiles of British artists like Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Sarah Lucas, Jake and Dino Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin. British art has reinvented itself and successfully courted wider attention than it has ever received before. On the face of it, much of their art has looked like simple bad behaviour—using chopped-up animals, pornography and sexually explicit mannequins as its material, or building up the features of a child murderer using tiny hand-prints. Yet their art has been both accessible and sophisticated, appealing to the mass media and to the elite art world alike.

But has it done so at the price of dumbing art down, reducing it to the level of any other consumer enterprise, and losing what is distinctive about art? Other than as publicity-fodder how seriously does it take the new audience that is so effectively courted? In this accessible book, Julian Stallabrass has written a sustained analysis of the British art scene, exploring the reasons for its popularity, the altered structure of the art world, and examining in detail the work of the leading figures. He also explores the reasons for art criticism’s so far limited purchase on this art.

Previous books about this subject have been either collections of essays or fan books, which try to aid acolytes hoping to navigate the art world. High Art Lite is the first sustained analysis of British art in the 1990s, and Stallabrass shows that, whatever we might think of the art itself, it raises fascinating questions about the relation of art to mass culture, the role of art in consumer society, the character of a national art, and the end of postmodernism.

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About the Author:

Julian Stallabrass is Reader in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His other books include Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, and Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce.

From Publishers Weekly:

The controversial Sensation exhibition--which prompted irate New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to attempt to cut off city funding to the Brooklyn Museum--typifies a new wave of media-addled "Young British Artists" who buoyed up to the surface this decade. Oxford art historian Stallabrass attempts an unmasking of their work as "high art lite," incisively arguing that most of it is neither formally innovative nor conceptually rich, and that many pieces owe their popularity and indeed their very existence to the ministrations of the art's major collector--British ad mogul Charles Saatchi. In a series of subtle, scholarly looks, Stallabrass (Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture) finds the work spiked with Dada, relentlessly up-to-date pop-cultural references and elements of minimalism and conceptual art, but nothing that reconceptualizes or surpasses the original uses of these modes by their (mostly American) innovators. He gives detailed but engaging analyses of attendance figures at the Saatchi collection-based Sensation, which began its world tour at the Royal Academy in London (where it caused similar controversy), and makes a strong case that the museum played into Saatchi's hands. (A museum's imprimatur greatly increases a collection's value.) With nearly 80 full-color reproductions of works by artists like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dino Chapman and Sam Taylor-Wood, the book neatly encapsulates the controversy surrounding their seemingly debased qualities, albeit from a British perspective. Stallabrass, as a veteran of British art journalism, writes compellingly and with a wide-ranging historical sense; readers will find such cogent contextualization essential to an often overheated debate. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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