Sorry, this isn’t the portrait the sheikh expected

From The Sunday Times

April 15, 2007

Richard Brooks and Sam Parkhouse

PORTRAITS by the British artist Annie Kevans of the royals who run the United Arab Emirates were intended as gifts from loyal subjects to two of the Gulf’s most powerful rulers.

But the pictures have been deemed so embarrassing they cannot be presented.

Rather than depicting two regal and wealthy potentates, the watercolours of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the vice-president, show them as fey teenagers.

“I wanted them to look vulnerable,” said Kevans, whose new solo show, Swans, opens on June 1 at the London gallery 319 Portobello Road.

The portraits were commissioned by Shehab Gargash, a UAE property magnate and his wife Lamees Hamdan, who was voted top businesswoman in the emirates in 2005. She is interested in art and is behind a major exhibition of Arab artists that opened in Dubai last month.

The sheikhs were due to be handed the portraits soon as a mark of respect by the business couple.

Maktoum, also the ruler of Dubai, has close ties to Britain, where he has a home and owns a leading racing stable and, a few months ago, almost became the owner of Liverpool football club.

Khalifa is also the ruler of Abu Dhabi which, like Dubai, is one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE.

Kevans, several of whose paintings were snapped up from her degree show in 2004 by Charles Saatchi, had been given photographs of the two men, taken recently, to work from.

The resulting portraits were expected to show them as they are now — in middle age, looking regal, powerful and rich.

Gargash and Hamdan, however, appear to have been disappointed by the outcome.

“I’ve now been told my pictures would offend them [the sheikhs] so they are not going to get them any more,” said Kevans, 34. “Lamees has said I would have insulted them because I did them without beards and without their headgear.”

Kevans is one of the rising stars of the British art scene, with work bought by Saatchi, Marc Quinn — himself a leading artist — and David Roberts, a Scottish property developer who is now one of the biggest spenders on art in Britain.

She pointed out that it was her style to paint portraits of her subjects in their youth — she has used this technique with the American presidents George W Bush, John F Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.

“That’s what I tend to do. I’ve also done Hitler and Pol Pot as youngsters,” said Kevans.

Flora Fairbairn, Kevans’s art dealer, said Hamdan had not fully appreciated the artist’s way of working before commissioning her.

“She saw a magazine article with Annie’s work,” said Fairbairn. “But maybe it did not occur to her that Annie would not paint them as they are today.”

The sponsors of the paintings, despite their embarrassment, are to pay Kevans’s fee all the same. But the artist has decided not to accept commissions in the future.

The Bombay Boys

From The Times

April 7, 2007

India’s answer to Brit Art comes with an explosion of bold new artists riding the wave of the nation’s economic boom

James Collard

“At the Saatchi gallery?,” we ask, incredulously. “There’s a Saatchi gallery in Bombay?” We’ve heard, back in London, that Indian contemporary art might be the next big thing. That just as money and art collided in Britain in our Nineties Cool Britannia moment, so a new generation of Indian collectors are spending some of the wealth generated by India’s current economic boom on the work of an equally happening new wave of Indian artists. And that savvy Korean dealers – and they’re pretty sharp about these things in downtown Seoul – have decided that the last big thing, which was Chinese contemporary, is now overhyped and overpriced, which makes its relatively affordable Indian counterpart a promising “real-estate” investment. We’ve taken all of this on board in a kind of crash course in Indian contemporary art from Mumbai to Kolkata, our eyes occasionally glazing over at at the mention of another utterly unfamiliar but locally illustrious name – and then popping wide open again when we see the quality of some of the art.

Rathin Kanji? Never heard of him, until last month, but what a way with colour. And back then if you’d told me Baiju Parthan was a vegetarian dish from Tamil Nadu, I’d have believed you. Today, I’d say that this Kerala-born, Mumbai-based artist has my absolute respect. But a Saatchi gallery in India? Even given Charles Saatchi’s reputation as an early adopter of up-and-coming artists, that’s too far ahead of the curve, surely.

“No, the Sakshi Gallery,” explains artist Riyas Komu, smiling broadly. Komu has shown several times in the Sakshi, one of a cluster of galleries in Mumbai’s emerging “art village” in south Mumbai. Now Komu’s work can be seen in London – in the first show at the Aicon Gallery, a new showcase for contemporary Indian art in the former Gagosian space on Heddon Street, which is central, prestigious and big enough to display to good effect Komu’s mesmerising, large-scale paintings and his fine sculptures in wood and metal. Meanwhile back home, Mumbai’s commuters drive past billboards of Komu’s work, to the din of car horns: appropriately enough, as these are portraits of the mechanics from the car-repair shop where Komu also has his metalwork studio, currently displayed on the roadside as part of the city’s “Mumbai Unbreakable” campaign against inter-communal hatred. But arguably the weirdest place to view Komu’s work is in Kolkata, where one of his paintings hangs in a group show of Italian and Indian contemporary art in the vast, late-Raj wedding cake of a building that is the Victoria Memorial Hall.

In India, most monuments of Empire have been shunted out of sight, forgotten or renamed, just as Calcutta has become Kolkata and Bombay, Mumbai. But “the Victoria” remains pretty much as it was, in all its dotty glory – which leaves a large white marble statue of Queen Mary standing right by Komu’s painting, her eyes fixed on her husband, the late King-Emperor, standing across the hall, equally oblivious to this edgy new art all around them. “It’s part of our history,” says Rathin Kanji, the Kolkata artist showing me around, “so it’s important to preserve it.” Which is true. Yet somehow leaving all this Imperial kitsch stranded here, utterly irrelevant to what India has become, seems a far more powerful anti-colonial statement than dynamiting the whole pile would ever have been.

“I think it’s gone beyond argument,” says Riyas Komu affably, of the change from Bombay to Mumbai, though like many inhabitants of the city, he uses both names interchangeably. But Komu himself seems set to be known as a Bombay Boy for some time to come. For back in 2004, Komu’s art appeared in an influential group show in New Delhi of work by 12 Mumbai-based artists entitled The Bombay Boys. It seems to have been a fairly throwaway handle for the show. There are successful female artists in the city; there just weren’t any in this line-up. But it’s a sexy title and it stuck, and while in the long-run, the group identity might prove irksome, just as it can for even the most successful of boybands, for the moment the artists find it amusing, and it seems to work for them – collectively raising their profile, both in India and beyond in the wealthy Indian diaspora, scattered everywhere from Silicon Valley to Park Lane. For as well as the flash new rich of Mumbai and Bangalore’s Brahmin geeks, striving for a well-earned rise and a good marriage, the prosperity generated by the free-market reforms of the Nineties has produced a new Indian art-buyer – and a new breed of gallerist keen to sell them not a Hirst or Barney, but something closer to home by a Komu or a Kanji.

“What’s striking about the Bombay Boys,” declares Abhay Sardesai, editor of Art India magazine, as we sip wine at an opening at the Sakshi Gallery, “and so appropriate for this moment in India’s history, is that it’s more of a brand than an artistic movement.” True, at the core of the Boys is a group of friends who support each other and party together in Mumbai’s lively social scene. But their characters and art are very different – and they’re happy to point up the paradoxes of the “brand”. As the ceramic artist Anant Joshi explains, “We’re in our thirties or early forties, many of us have got married also, so it’s not like we’re really boys any more.” What’s more, they’re not from Bombay, precisely. Joshi, for example, was born in Nagpur, in central India, while Bose Krishnamachari (generally known as Bose), T.V. Santhosh, Baiju Parthan, V.N. Jyothi Basu and Komu himself are from Kerala, the poor but beautiful, highly literate and historically communist-voting state in the south. But what these Boys all have in common is that like countless Indians, educated or illiterate, in order to make their way in life, they first made their way to this, the Maximum City, where some 14 million lives rub up against each other and compete for space, food, water and success. (That’s 14 million and counting, with perhaps another 10 million in the outer suburbs.)

Bose has called Mumbai “an all-embracing space of opportunity and optimism where people come to try to realise their dreams”. But it’s not always been easy for the Boys. Although he describes it today as “one of the most harmonious of cities,” Komu, a gentle, lovely man, was dismayed by the bitter inter-communal violence between Hindus and Muslims of 1992-3. Similarly, Joshi’s feeling for the place must have been both challenged and enriched by the experience of living for a time in a single room in Dharavi, reputedly Asia’s largest slum (which must be saying something). Other Boys faced professional challenges: Parthan, working as an illustrator at The Times of India, initially struggled to be taken seriously as an artist. Bose achieved early success, but in 1992, just as the free-market reforms began, some of his bolder works must have seemed a step ahead of the Zeitgeist in India, as one critic recently recalled: “The triumphant trumpet blasts of the YBAs [Young British Artists] received critical endorsement and art-historical approval… By contrast, Bose’s catchy ouput didn’t find sympathetic, critical counterparts who would read it as reflective of a changing nation and its fast transmogrifying art world.”

Today, it’s a different story – just as India is a different country, with a generation of Indians for whom MTV seems more relevant than Gandhi or Nehru (whose left-wing, Fabian-influenced economic policies were arguably one of our less useful gifts to India). For many Indians this transformation feels, in a sense, like another revolution, a second independence, bringing with it the freedom to consume – and while not every dotcom start-up is going to produce an Indian Medici, enough Indians, at home and abroad, now have the money and taste to have transformed the Indian contemporary art scene.

“There’s huge interest,” says Zara Porter-Hill, head of the Indian and South-East Asian department at Sotheby’s. “With the growing Indian economy, of course Indian collectors will want to buy art from their country, art with which they feel a particular connection…” Serious Indian collectors are also interested in international art, Porter-Hill insists, a trend likely to continue as the work of international artists – including Mumbai-born Anish Kapoor – increasingly show in the city. But Abhay Sardesai agrees with the suggestion that for a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) living in California, a piece of Indian contemporary art on his wall might also express a pride in how well his country is doing – and a belief in how glittering its future could be – as well as his or her love of art or eye for an investment. “We can’t claim modernity through this, exactly, as that can constantly be punctured by what you see in the villages or even here in Mumbai, but the art scene can be seen as part of India’s new status as a global player.”

Buying up-and-coming Indian art for a hundred grand or so seems a far cry from swadeshi, Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of boycotting British-milled cotton (which made white homespun the uniform of the new Indian ruling elite for decades). But for an earlier generation of artists, many of whom (in Kerala especially) simply gave up on the idea of being a professional artist, the thought of an Indian gallery setting up shop in London’s West End must feel as cheering as Mr Tata buying Corus. Gallerist Projjal Dutta’s story straddles the divide between the old Indian art scene, underfunded and unglitzy, and the new. In 2002 Projjal and his brother, Prajit, both US-based academics, launched Arts India – itself a dotcom start-up, albeit one selling Indian art online. Next they opened a gallery space beside their Manhattan offices, followed by a larger space in the Flatiron district and another in Palo Alto, in California’s Silicon Valley. And now Aicon in London: an ambitious statement of where they feel Indian art is heading, apparently justified by sales of Riyas Komu’s work, which fetches from £25,000 to £75,000, “mostly to non-Indians,” Projjal says, “many buying Indian art for the first time”. The brothers also run two private equity funds investing in Indian contemporary art. But they grew up in New Delhi, where their father, “a bureaucrat really, running the government fine arts academy, developed a love of art and artists, who were always staying with us when we were growing up. There was no money for artists back then.”

“Everything has changed in the last few years,” agrees Komu. Joshi says that, “before to be an artist wasn’t appreciated, but the money changes things.” The Bombay Boys all welcome the emergence of a Western-style art infrastructure, operated by dealers who are prepared to nurture artists for the long term and to promote their work. This enables “more risk-taking,” Komu argues, while Joshi claims, “It gives me freedom to experiment, rather than worrying about will this sell or how I’m going to survive for the next two months.”

Given that survival – as Joshi knows perfectly well from those months in the slums – is still a daily challenge for many Indians, outside the malls and swanky new apartments with white walls just made for a great piece of art, not everyone sees the new art scene as an unmixed blessing. Soumitra Das, who reports on art for the Kolkata Telegraph, asks whether this “isn’t just another kind of consumerism, in which the poor get left behind?” Perhaps he has a point. India and China are often touted as the future, but seen upclose they often look spookily like our past, in which enterprise and bold technological innovation existed cheek by jowl with squalor and grinding poverty. Nehru-style socialism wasn’t much cop at eradicating poverty, I point out, and Das agrees, but it’s still a hard argument to counter: why buy a painting for a few grand when that money could feed a family for years or put a dozen poor children through school? Still, those kind of judgments apply to the rest of us when we buy “must-have” bags or sports cars, as much as they apply to prosperous Indians, even if the Indian kind of poverty isn’t something we drive by every day in air-conditioned limos.

Yet what struck me about all of the artists I met in India was a kind of engagement – social or political – that I think would be unusual on the Western art scene today. In Kolkata, sculptor Adip Dutta’s studio is open to the street, just like the nearby motor-repair shops, with passers-by staring at his works-in-progress – sculptures which sometimes boldly explore issues of gender and sexuality (and which form the second Aicon show). Santhosh’s paintings are beautiful as objects, but scratch beneath the surface and he shows a passionate interest in the victims of both terrorism and the war on terror, while Kanji’s paintings might contain graphics about communal violence or ecological destruction. There’s engagement; there’s also faith, which I don’t recall being a major theme for the YBAs. Kanji shows me the Anglican cathedral in Kolkata where he worships most Sundays (with its memorials to long-dead subalterns), and Komu, whose work often features Arabic calligraphy as well as the communist iconography he grew up with, has talked about “a guiding force” that helps him. In Kolkata, artist Debanjan Ray shows me his image of a Hindu god as Superman – the kind of thing that can get you into trouble with Hindu conservatives (who can be as hardline as any mullah on such matters). But do you believe, I ask him. “Yes, of course!” And when pressed – as I’m drawn to such things and have just bought an image of Lakshmi, sitting on her lotus leaf – he patiently demonstrates to me how to pray to this, the Hindu goddess of wealth and wisdom. So perhaps even amid the pizzazz and profits of today’s Indian art scene, there are moments when the Mahatma would feel completely at home.

Riyas Komu’s Other, a joint show with Peter Drake, is at the Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, until April 20. Adip Dutta’s show, Man – Nam, runs from April 27 until June 5 (www.aicongallery.com )

Tomorrow's old masters

From The Sunday Times

April 1, 2007

The market for modern art is going through the roof. But will the Damiens and the Traceys stand the test of time along with the Rembrandts and Picassos? Waldemar Januszczak selects the living icons of British art who have the best chance of immortality

Lots of people think the art market is booming. But they're wrong. The art market isn't booming, it's going nuclear, exploding into the next dimension and running naked around the universe yelling "Geronimo!" Last June, the Manhattan magnate Ronald S Lauder shelled out $135m for a pretty portrait by Klimt. It was the most anyone had spent on a painting. But later that year, the entertainment mogul David Geffen sold his Jackson Pollock for $140m. And last November, Sotheby's and Christie's sold art worth $1.3 billion. In four working days.

Jeremiahs like me assume this mega-bubble is temporary, that any moment now it's going to pop. But the most terrifying truth about this expansion is that it shows no sign of reaching its apogee. Talk to the dealers and they see nothing on the horizon but bigger cheques. So what's happening? Obviously the quantity of bonus money out there is a reason for the boom. Whether you work for Moneycorp in the City or Cash International on Wall Street, nobody likes the walls of their loft to look empty. And the hedge-fund managers are merely replicating what the hedge funds themselves are up to now that they've realised that nothing increases in value as exponentially as art. About a decade ago, the auction houses had a eureka moment and realised if they put the same resources behind new art as they put behind old masters, they would have a supply of goodies that was effectively bottomless. Unlike old masters or impressionists, the supply of contemporary art can never dry up.

If you are not the type with a spare couple of billion to spend on art, you may assume this story isn't for you. But I'm not sure about that. Watching the art market going mad is just as educative as watching birds hatching with Bill Oddie. As a crash course, I've produced a list of the 20 most important living British artists and some of their key works. This lot at least will certainly survive the trial by money.

PETER BLAKE

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, album cover (1967)

While most artists of his generation retired to the country long ago, or moved to California, the combative Peter Blake is still to be found pottering around cutting-edge London shows delivering sarcastic put-downs of this trend and that. He's a magnificent presence. And considering that he created perhaps the most successful artistic multiple ever - cunningly disguised as the album cover for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album - this refusal to retreat from the front line is extra-special. Blake grew up in a glum bit of Kent, and was one of those cut-off kids who keep themselves sane, and full of dreams, by collecting pictures of sexy actresses and fab pop stars. It was to prove the perfect training for a pop artist. When the Beatles commissioned him in 1967 to design their Sgt Pepper cover, the idea was to assemble all the people in history whom the band would have liked to see in an imaginary audience. That's how Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan and the rest came together. John Lennon wanted Jesus and Gandhi in the crowd as well, but they were vetoed by the record company.

Where is it? The large-scale collage was dismantled after a photoshoot. Some elements were sold to collectors

LUCIAN FREUD

Leigh Bowery (Seated) (1990)

Officially the world's greatest living painter, Freud had long been famous when he unleashed this painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 and made himself more famous still. The show had half-a-dozen paintings of the huge Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery, each more monstrous than the next. Never a quick worker, Freud was nearly 70 when he painted them, so everyone expected him to slow down further. Instead, he sped up and has been painting at a fierce lick ever since. It's his taste for a harsh reality - strikingly unsexy yet charged with sex - that slaps you about the chops with the impact of a wet fish.

Where is it? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

SARAH LUCAS

Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992)

Britart was probably the most dramatic art movement these shores have ever spawned. When it exploded out of nowhere in the early 1990s, and suddenly turned our art into the world leader in international modernism, most of us weren't sure what to make of it because British art had never been the world leader in international modernism before. Lots of people around the globe tut-tutted at Britart's excesses. But they all noticed it. Except, curiously, Tate Modern, which in the manner of a nervous parent embarrassed by the behaviour of their own kids in the park, has largely succeeded in ignoring it. If Damien Hirst is the king of Britart, then Sarah Lucas is its queen. Funny, acerbic, rude, inventive and, above all, mouthy, her work marks the first appearance on the global stage of the British ladette. There have been plenty of women artists before. But Lucas was the first who might have been discovered working at the checkout of your local Tesco. Was she ever bovvered? Leave orff! I particularly adore Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab because the eggs and the kebab need to be changed every day, and although it is a witty portrayal of the artist's body, it also allows a startling insight into her mind. Which is clearly a female cesspit filled with all manner of dark and unsettling insights into the crudest masculine urges. British art at its noisiest.

Who owns it? Damien Hirst

SARAH LUCAS

Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992)

Britart was probably the most dramatic art movement these shores have ever spawned. When it exploded out of nowhere in the early 1990s, and suddenly turned our art into the world leader in international modernism, most of us weren't sure what to make of it because British art had never been the world leader in international modernism before. Lots of people around the globe tut-tutted at Britart's excesses. But they all noticed it. Except, curiously, Tate Modern, which in the manner of a nervous parent embarrassed by the behaviour of their own kids in the park, has largely succeeded in ignoring it. If Damien Hirst is the king of Britart, then Sarah Lucas is its queen. Funny, acerbic, rude, inventive and, above all, mouthy, her work marks the first appearance on the global stage of the British ladette. There have been plenty of women artists before. But Lucas was the first who might have been discovered working at the checkout of your local Tesco. Was she ever bovvered? Leave orff! I particularly adore Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab because the eggs and the kebab need to be changed every day, and although it is a witty portrayal of the artist's body, it also allows a startling insight into her mind. Which is clearly a female cesspit filled with all manner of dark and unsettling insights into the crudest masculine urges. British art at its noisiest.

Who owns it? Damien Hirst

BRIDGET RILEY

Movement in Squares (1961)

The Tate had a Bridget Riley retrospective in 2003 that reminded us just how marvellous she is. From the moment you walked in there until long after you left, your eyes buzzed and throbbed with painful pleasure, a sensation that I imagine vibrators must bring to other bits of the human anatomy. Over the years, Riley has grown softer and more colourful, but her art remains completely devoted to full-on optical abstraction. I particularly adore her early work, which was strikingly black and white and which ended up being a huge influence on the 1960s miniskirt. This one, Movement in Squares, is a perfect example of her genius for getting her paintings to move, roll and shimmer while actually remaining perfectly still. After a good Riley exhibition, I find my eyes feel unusually clean, as if they've been washed in some crystal-clear mountain water. Although she remains unmistakable - one of the signature brands of British art - she has, until recently, been curiously undervalued, and still hasn't claimed her rightful place at the summit.

Who owns it? The Arts Council

Where is it? The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

GILBERT and GEORGE

Singing Sculpture (1969)

I have lots and lots of problems with Gilbert and George, and I don't think I have ever seen a more clear-cut example of a show that needed editing than their interminable recent retrospective at Tate Modern. But nobody should doubt the ultimate value of their contribution to British art. G&G were pioneers. Their early work, which remains the most inventive and charming area of their relentless output, achieved lots of things that were notable, but for me their most valuable contribution was to give piety a good kicking. They injected British art with the humour and cheek that had been missing since Hogarth's time. G&G themselves insisted they were bringing real life back into art, and sometimes they were. I never saw Singing Sculpture being performed, and from what I can gather it was done in different ways, but the classic version involved the two of them painting themselves gold, getting up on a pedestal, and miming along to Underneath the Arches. So it was like those living statues you see in our urban squares today, except that it happened almost 40 years ago.

Where was it? It was performed in Europe, the US and Australia

FRANK AUERBACH

Camden Theatre in the Rain (1977)

If you're looking for a painter who is self-evidently an artistic giant, then look no further than Frank Auerbach. Everything about him is impressive. Recently, there was some noisy stuff in the papers about this particular painting fetching £1.92m at Sotheby's, but the only real mystery is why it took so long for his prices to soar. Auerbach paints two things: people he knows well, and places he knows even better. For almost 50 years he has lived and worked in the same damp stretch of London around Mornington Crescent. Painting slowly, never going on holiday, he keeps having another go at what he's already had so many goes at. But the results always remain fluid and spontaneous. I've chosen this unusually bright one because at an Auerbach show at the Hayward Gallery in 1978, I spent 40 minutes in front of it and couldn't decide if it was angry, sad, optimistic, pessimistic, wet, dry, or what? I'm still not sure.

Who owns it? A private collector

ANTHONY CARO

Early One Morning (1962)

A golden rule of artistic importance goes something like this: those whom the times wish to make irrelevant they first make a knight of the realm. But with Sir Anthony Caro, the times may have got it wrong. Of course, it's been many years since he did anything cutting-edge. But nothing can take away the brilliance of his early work, particularly that exciting, surprisingly elegant red whopper poetically called Early One Morning. An assistant to the great Henry Moore, Caro inherited his master's desire to produce biggies, and a passion for metals. But only when Caro learnt to weld these metals and paint them in bright household colours did his sculptures spring to life.

Who owns it? The Tate - though it is currently not on display

RICHARD LONG

A Line in the Himalayas (1975)

Long has had so many shows over so many years that the heart forgets to skip a beat at the thought of another one. Yet he remains one of the most original sculptors there has ever been, and his relentless madcap campaign to create sculptures in the world's most distant landscapes is a really important contribution to landscape art. In short, Richard Long is God, and the good news for collectors is that the market seems not to have realised yet. But it will. Setting off on a walk that can last hours, days or even months, and that might take him as far as Mongolia, he makes sculptures as he goes, then photographs them. He also does word pieces and extra-minimal sculptures for inside the gallery. You get the feeling he's trying to connect with the sort of ancient meanings that led our ancestors to build Stonehenge.

Who owns it? The Tate - though it is currently not on display

BILL WOODROW

Twin-Tub with Guitar (1981)

The alchemists wanted to turn base metals into gold, something many assumed could never happen. But in 1981 I went to a show of British sculpture at the ICA, and there was Bill Woodrow achieving exactly that with old washing machines. Okay, strictly speaking, he wasn't turning them into gold. But he was making fabulously witty sculptures out of them. And they are worth plenty today. As the original and greatest recyclist, Woodrow initiated an important strain in British art devoted to transforming the rubbishy into the desirable. In Twin-Tub with Guitar, by cutting up a washing machine and ingeniously refolding the bits, he turned it into one of the most desirable electric guitars ever made, a Gretsch White Falcon.

Who owns it? The Tate - though it is currently not on display

DAMIEN HIRST

Alphaprodine spot painting (1991)

Whatever it is that Damien Hirst's sculptures do, his paintings do something different. The spot paintings in particular have been astonishingly influential. Three out of four designer lofts bought with loadsahedgefundmoney seem to have one on their walls, and those that don't have one want one. Considering how many there are, the prices they continue to fetch at auction are staggering. Hirst began the spot paintings in 1988, and although they look random, there is in fact a cunning pattern running through them. Each one represents the chemical formula of a different drug. Hirst has been working his way through the pharmaceutical alphabet to create a painting for every drug from A to B - this one is "AAP". So each painting is not only a highly effective bit of designer minimalism, but it's different from the one before. As a marketing strategy for churning out thousands of unique things, it's beyond brilliant.

Who owns it? A private collector

RON MUECK

Dead Dad (1996-7)

The day before Charles Saatchi's seminal Britart exhibition, Sensation, opened at the Royal Academy in 1997, hardly anyone had heard of Ron Mueck. By the next day, all those who hadn't heard of him before, like me, found ourselves unable to talk about anyone else. And the question 'Have you seen Dead Dad?' rang out across Piccadilly and echoed down every important corridor of the art world. Dead Dad was an extraordinary mix of the very touching and the very creepy. The sculpture was a perfect replica of the corpse of Mueck's naked father, so spookily detailed that you could count the hairs in his nose. But it was only two-thirds of the size of a real man. So as you looked at it, two conflicting responses welled up in you. The first was the unsettling feeling that you were in the presence of an actual corpse. But because he was so diddy, you also felt strangely maternal towards him. And wanted to hold him and hug him and protect him. Weird. Mueck perfected his hyperrealism skills working for children's television in Australia. Saatchi discovered him by chance when Mueck produced some props for his mother-in-law, the marvellous painter Paula Rego. Since his emergence, he has created a stunning body of work that prompts severe panic attacks about reality.

Who owns it? A private collector

YOKO ONO

Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1961)

All of us fantasise about being a fly on the wall at a particular moment in history, and I would really like to have been there when John Lennon met Yoko Ono. She was a London artist at the time, specialising in weird happenings. The fashionably wacky Indica Gallery gave her a show in 1966, and this fabulous piece was in it. It required the visitor to stand on a chair and bang a nail into a white wooden panel. Lennon came in and asked Ono if he could hammer in a nail too. Yes, she said, providing he paid five shillings. In that case, quipped Lennon, could he hammer in an imaginary nail? Yoko was a really big deal in the international art world at the time. Lennon was the intruder. But this didn't stop her being hounded out of Britain by an abominable British media. The real tragedy was not the Beatles splitting up but the shoddy treatment of the brilliant Yoko Ono.

Who owns it? The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

TRACEY EMIN

My Bed (1999)

I would have liked to choose the infamous tent embroidered with the names of everyone she has ever slept with to represent the notorious Tracey Emin, but it was destroyed in a fire. So I've gone for her next most outrageous work, My Bed, an entry for the Turner prize in 1999. Tracey's sheets, ashtray, bedside literature, morning-after pills, condoms and knickers have all been transported from her bedroom so that everyone can see exactly how she lives. As Britain's official representative at this year's über-prestigious Venice Biennale, Emin is about to become more notorious still - by showing paintings. Strangely enough, her work remains modestly priced.

Who owns it? The Saatchi Gallery - though it is currently not on display

JAKE and DINOS CHAPMAN

Hell (1998-2000)

Pick a war, any war, and you have all the explanation you need for the Chapman brothers. They make art that accuses their fellow humans of unimaginable terrors and crimes. As Hannah Arendt noted in her 1960s report on the Eichmann trial, evil is banal, and the Chapmans emphasise that point by making their art out of stuff that can be bought at Hamleys: toy soldiers, blood from a tube and scary plastic monsters. Their anti-war masterpiece, Hell, consisted of nine grotesque scenes of carnage and violence.

Where is it? The original was destroyed in the Momart fire of 2004, but the Chapman brothers are working on a replacement

GRAYSON PERRY

We've Found the Body of Your Child (2000)

The canny modern artist needs a gimmick to stand out from the crowd. And Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner prize in 2003, has come up with a humdinger. I don't know what's more extraordinary about Perry, the fact that he's a potter or the transvestism. Both seem to get slightly in the way of his seriousness. On closer inspection, he turns out to be a complex and feisty social observer who uses the surface innocence of his pots to worm his way into dark corners of the British psyche. From his own sexuality to the murderous instincts of country folk, there is no topic he won't broach. The pots are gorgeous too.

Who owns it? The Saatchi Gallery - though it is currently not on display

CHRIS OFRILI

The Upper Room (1999-2002)

It took me a while to come round to Chris Ofili. He emerged ever so noisily in the middle of the 1990s with a silly-sounding strategy of leaning all his pictures on chunks of elephant dung, which made his work instantly notorious, and very smelly. In 1998 he won the Turner prize, and I thought that would be that with him. But an impressive appearance in the British pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2003 convinced me of the irresistibility of Ofili's art, and the more I see of him the more significant I believe him to be. As the first black artist from Britain to achieve proper international prominence, Ofili is playing a role that nobody else can ever repeat. Apart from the elephant dung, his first pictures featured Aboriginal dots, cuttings from porn mags, African bead work, hip-hop sprayings, and the heroes of obscure blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. So how they managed to hang together as beautifully as they did I will never know. The Upper Room was acquired by the Tate in controversial circumstances in 2005. Ofili was on the Tate's board of trustees at the time, so lots of people did lots of whispering. But the truth is that the nation is fantastically lucky to own this. Mysterious, hypnotic, filled with mouth-wateringly gorgeous paintings, The Upper Room is easily the finest Tate acquisition of recent years.

Who owns it? The Tate, though it is currently not on display

RICHARD HAMILTON

Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956)

Hamilton is now an astonishing 85 years old. But a genuine innovator spits in the face of time, and he is still experimenting madly with every new technology, still digging away at the fabric of the modern world, searching for its DNA. That's what he's doing here. This tiny collage, only about 10in by 10in, is universally recognised as the first ever piece of pop art. The beefcake holding the giant lollipop that gave its name to a whole art movement is Zabo, a Californian bodybuilder. The pin-up on the settee, the TV, the vacuum cleaner, and the movie playing through the window have all been cut out from American magazines and glued together to form this trendy London interior. Was the country really being liberated from post-war gloom by these go-ahead imports, or was it being colonised?

Who owns it? Zundel collection, Kunsthalle, Tubingen, Germany

DAMIEN HIRST

Mother and Child, Divided (1993)

Hirst is the only artist I have selected twice, but, believe me, he warrants it. His arrival was nothing less than history-changing. Before, artists were a highly dependent breed of creative, controlled by their dealers, showing in galleries and waiting to be noticed. He declined to join in with this process, and invented a new one. Basically, he seized power. Although his sculpture is astonishing in itself, it is his redefinition of the role of the artist that will eventually be seen as his most significant contribution. Today he creates his own shows, he collects, he starts restaurants, and I hear he's soon to become the owner of his own museum. While the most notorious of his early sculptures was his pickled shark or, to give it its proper title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, for its sheer wow factor I choose Mother and Child, Divided. I will never forget the hot day at the Venice Biennale when I came across this thing, and found myself strolling down the centre of a cow.

Who owns it? Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway

BANKSY

Chalk Farm mural (2006)

Once every decade or so, an artist emerges who isn't only churning out good work but seems also to be redefining what artists do. In the 1950s the great Richard Hamilton was such a figure. In the 1990s it was Damien Hirst. Right now, it's Banksy.

Nobody is supposed to know who Banksy is. He's a street outlaw, a mystery man, a guerrilla artist who pops up in our streets at nght and sprays graffiti masterpieces onto our walls. Or who sneaks into our museums and adds cheeky examples of his own work to their collections. His exploits are certainly fun to follow. And his amusing brand of agit-pop, passed on from website to website, circulating so freely in cyberspace, is perfectly judged for the current political climate. Ever since Angelina Jolie spent nearly £200,000 buying Banksy pictures at a show in LA, he has also metamorphosed into a thoroughly surprising art-market hit. It's probably too early to be certain that Banksy really is an artist of long-term significance. But my gut instinct is that he is.

Where is it? On the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1