Young British Artists of the Nineties are dismissed as outdated relics

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 2 April 2003

The so-called Young British Artists championed by Charles Saatchi are relics of the near past, the head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) insisted yesterday as the advertising guru prepared to open a new London gallery.

The so-called Young British Artists championed by Charles Saatchi are relics of the near past, the head of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) insisted yesterday as the advertising guru prepared to open a new London gallery.

Philip Dodd, the ICA's director, said of the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose work will take pride of place in the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall: "The YBAs are a very Nineties story."

Yesterday, though, Mr Dodd was faced with a tricky problem as he revealed what he said was the future of British art: much of it was proving somewhat elusive.

Unveiling the annual Beck's Futures exhibition, featuring nine artists shortlisted for a share of £56,000 prize money, Mr Dodd admitted that many of their works could not be put on show in the conventional environment of the ICA's galleries in the Mall.

Carey Young, for example, even went so far as to produce a gagging order preventing Beck's from using one of her works, created but seen by no one apart from the sponsors, for their own publicity under pain of having to pay damages. Ironically, her efforts provoked the greatest interest in the sponsors since the prize began in the year 2000.

Another, Nick Crowe, created a cyberglobe of 74 website addresses showing the world as under constant armed attack. It is represented in the show by his website address on the wall and 10,000 promotional plastic bags.

Inventory, an art co-op, staged a football match in the Mall, which is represented only by photographs of the game, and is also making a 40-second film for BBC4.

Lucy Skaer planted tropical moth pupae under seats at the Old Bailey, but was not there to see them hatch.

Asked whether he only really had half a show, Mr Dodd said: "We've got a show and a half and the half is what is elsewhere."In a dig at Mr Saatchi's new venture, he added: "Historically the principle on which the ICA has worked is do it first. Given Saatchi's identification with the Nineties and that the first few shows are all of the Nineties, [his new gallery] has the feel of a contemporary art museum. It's a museum of the recent past. It's different from showing artists that haven't been canonised."

Mr Dodd said the new generation presented in Beck's Futures were shameless and were defined by a kind of DIY aesthetic – or, as critics of conceptual art would see it, by a total absence of "art" in the commonly accepted sense.

Video works, such as those by Alan Currall, in which he reads the contents of his will or recites a message to his best friend, did not require expensive materials or huge ranks of assistants.

Mr Dodd quoted the Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew in claiming that art now was more like an "experimental laboratory", examining questions of who we are and where we are, than it was about paintings.

A spokesman for Mr Saatchi said it was unfair to categorise his art as passé. He continued to collect young, unknown artists and many of them would be featured in the new gallery when it opened on 17 April.

Other shortlisted artists for the Beck's prize are David Sherry, Francis Upritchard, Bernd Behr and Rosalind Nashashibi. The top prize of £24,000 will be announced on 29 April, with the remaining eight artists each receiving £4,000.

The Saatchi coterie

DAMIEN HIRST The original bad boy of the YBAs, Hirst, born in 1965 in Bristol, was the brains behind Freeze, the seminal art show of his Goldsmiths' class of 1988. Rapidly became famous for pickling a shark, cows and sheep, and his work commands prices of up to £1m.

SARAH LUCAS Her aggressive series of self-portrait photographs contributed to her sharing the bad girl of BritArt tag with her friend Tracey Emin. In works such as 'Au Naturel'fruit and household objects are assembled into suggestive sculptures. Born in 1962 in London.

MARC QUINN Quinn, born in 1964, studied history and art history at Cambridge and was not part of the Goldsmiths' crowd, but he later shared a flat with Hirst and his conceptual art, such as a sculpture of his head made of nine pints of his blood, grabbed Saatchi's attention.

The ICA contenders

DAVID SHERRY Sherry, born in Northern Ireland in 1974, is a performance artist based in Glasgow, who will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale of Art this summer. In his video 'Stitching' he is seen apparently sewing balsa wood on to the soles of his feet.

FRANCIS UPRITCHARD New Zealand-born, London-based Upritchard, 27, is fascinated by taxidermy and fetishistic effigies such as the shrunken heads of Maori tradition or her own simulations in the shape of the Prince of Wales. Her main work here is a moaning, vibrating mummy.

CAREY YOUNG Young, who has worked in business, takes the art of PR and marketing to create her key work, a legally binding Non-Disclosure Agreement forbidding Scottish Courage, Beck's distributor, disclosing what she has been commissioned to make for the show.