By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 6, 2000
The British are nuts about their artists, and by nuts I mean they are out of their minds. The condition shows no sign of easing -- the reverse in fact, thanks to the Tate Modern, a huge new engine of national self-congratulation spurring many ancillary goings-on. Fresh galleries are suddenly open, including another branch of the American dealer Larry Gagosian's empire. American colonization betrays growing trans-Atlantic regard, a sure sign of change.
To be in London these days is to be endlessly entertained by art, by the museums that show it, the multiplying galleries that sell it and the masses who have become weirdly fascinated by it. Entertainment does not necessarily equal enlightenment, but that is where the art world is, at least this corner of it. The scene, increasingly hard just to keep up with, is becoming geographically almost as dispersed as it is in Los Angeles. Older Mayfair galleries compete for attention with newer spots in the East End, where various young artists live, and particularly with growing numbers in Hoxton Square, once a gangland quarter, where it is still not a great idea to wander far from the clutch of galleries and fashionable bars clustered immediately around the square. This is of course an asset, nothing being more appealing to a contemporary art crowd than the frisson of slumming.
People here act as if a steady profusion of activity plus global attention means London has already elbowed New York out of the way as art world capital, never mind that much of the work you see was in New York first. Considering that the most talked-about show in New York this season was ''Sensation,'' who can blame them for boasting? I spent a couple of days looking around before the Tate opening and found it remarkable to see a country fall so madly for its art, or for its art scene, which is slightly different.
It's love-hate for the British. Having generally loved to hate whatever is new in art, they have come to love hating the latest wave so much that it is now impossible for an outsider to distinguish between reactions. The press certainly love and hate art extravagantly here. The Y.B.A.'s, or Young British Artists like Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracy Emin and the Chapman brothers, by this point understandably loathe the label, which no longer applies, although they continue to feed and delight the local tabloids with juvenile mischief to maintain their improbable movie-star status. Competition for headlines, more fierce in Britain than in the United States, accounts for a lot of the emphasis here on shock art.
The magazine Vogue Britain has even joined in lately, turning much of its May issue over to the Tate and to several Y.B.A.'s whom it asked to make art inspired by Kate Moss. Now if that isn't a sign that the British are nuts, what is?
I started with a peek into Mr. Saatchi's gallery, and in the morning found people lined up out the door waiting to pay for a glimpse of Mr. Hirst's latest chef-d'ouevre, ''Hymn.'' Ten minutes passed quickly enough, although who can remember the last time a wait was required to see a show in a private gallery (this one sponsored by The Independent newspaper), with a fee charged for the privilege of entering?
The Saatchi show is one more Y.B.A. push, a familiar affair with Ms. Lucas, Ron Mueck, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread, Jenny Saville and Chris Ofili of elephant-dung fame, about whose big decorative collages there is now little to say absent the impetus of political scandal.
The spacious gallery had the effect of making the art seem even more slight. Mr. Mueck is a clever trompe l'oeil conjurer, and Ms. Saville, aspiring to Lucian Freud, increasingly qualifies as a watchable painter.
But Ms. Lucas has achieved fame photographing herself sitting on a toilet and casting herself in plaster from the waist down, naked, cigarette inserted into vagina. Ms. Whiteread's sculptures of the spaces beneath chairs, lined up on the floor in receding rows, suit Mr. Saatchi's loftlike rooms; but whoever it was who said her works resemble headstones at a pet cemetery had a point.
As for Mr. Hirst, his ''Hymn'' is a two-story version in painted bronze of one of those anatomical bodies showing internal organs, inert, shiny and awful.
London reviewers have raved about it.
Afterward, a man I stopped in the subway station who knew perfectly well who Damien Hirst was looked at me sideways when I asked how to get across town to Hoxton Square. You don't really mean to go there, he said. I do, I assured him, and in fact the place, rapidly changing, is already feeling gentrified. Jay Jopling, the clever Y.B.A. dealer who runs the stylish Mayfair gallery called White Cube, has just opened the newest place there, White Cube2, a sleek room not unlike Mary Boone's former SoHo gallery with the same aura of fresh minted money. Its first show, my next stop, consisted of more Y.B.A.'s, including the Chapman brothers, Gavin Turk, Mona Hatoum and Ms. Emin.
Ms. Emin's confessional art has made her a British teen idol. This seems apt. Ms. Hatoum, whose sculptures include spiky wheelchairs, an electrified room and a giant vegetable grater, is everywhere to be seen in London now, another acquired taste, I suppose, like steak and kidney pie.
Mr. Turk has made a sculpture of himself as the dead Che Guevara on a bier, his usual. Only the Chapmans, with a miniature reproduction of a MacDonald's drive-through restaurant, were noticeable for no other reason than that this was not one of their familiar multi-genital mannequins.
Do I sound grumpy? I am not really. A funny thing about London is that one has a good time without seeing much good new art. Maybe it's because everyone here seems to be enjoying themselves so thoroughly. I liked a free-spirited video survey at a mostly gutted five-story building in Covent Garden rented by the excellent Lisson Gallery. The building is to be converted to apartments. Having just been to the new Tate, which is simultaneously spiffy and gloomy because of its vast Piranesian lobby, I was naturally inclined toward the ramshackle ambience of Lisson's temporary quarters, despite a few hazards. Pitch-black empty spaces combined with my lack of coordination to cause me at one point to walk straight into a wall.
Several men, trying to look disinterested, lingered before one of Vanessa Beecroft's videos of a barely clad woman parading as if on a runway. Ms. Beecroft provides the art world's current excuse for soft-core peeping, and her invitation-only performances are primarily occasions for exclusionary bonding, a fundamental art world right. I joined the gawkers briefly, then caught a video I'd already seen at the Venice Biennale, a looping comic narrative by Rodney Graham in which he plays a castaway.
It is as lush as a David Lean production. Video art, having gleaned more and more from Hollywood and Madison Avenue, yearly raises the level of its production values while settling for ever more diverse forms of amusement. Mr. Graham's exercise is the state of art at the moment.
That fact made the Hayward Gallery's overview of sound art, ''Sonic Boom,'' my next stop, seem anachronistic. It involves the predictable buzzing, beeping, screeching and gadgetry plus kinetics and video. A formerly viable-seeming category in the pregnant space between music and visual art, sound art has been largely superseded since the 1970's by video and installation art, which also mix sound and image but more variously. The show made one wonder why there hasn't been an exhibition about the relationship between modern music and art, tracing the line from Franz Marc and Arnold Schoenberg to Morton Feldman and John Cage to Robert Rauschenberg and Mr. Nauman and Mr. Graham.
''The Greenhouse Effect'' at the Serpentine Gallery turned out to be yet something else: a prim exercise in new work about nature and the man-made. Trompe l'oeil dominated, with examples by Yoshihiro Suda, Roxy Paine, Tony Matelli, Tom Friedman, Yutaka Sone and Tim Hawkinson. Some of these artists have elsewhere been exploring the link between science and art interestingly. But here their fake little trees and flowers entailed much vapid craftsmanship, and the Art Nouveau overview at the Victoria and Albert Museum nearby infelicitously made for a telling counterpoint, nature having inspired a century ago a vastly richer artistic efflorescence.
Craftsmanship by itself, a traditional occupation, has clearly become a factor in contemporary art, improbably linking Mr. Graham's video with Mr. Mueck's sculptures as well as with the ''Greenhouse'' artists and a lot of other work that one sees in New York and elsewhere. Here it raises an odd point: traditional values seem somehow to mix in Britain with a taste for abasement as demonstrated by the Y.B.A.'s and with spirituality to create what strikes a foreigner as psychic chaos.
One of the most popular art events before the opening of the new Tate was a very beautiful, deeply spiritual show about Jesus at the National Gallery, which has been followed by a show of works by living artists based on paintings in the gallery's collection, illustrating another kind of devotion.
The other well-attended show was also tradition-bound, an exhibition at Tate Britain about Ruskin, the most censorious, biblically minded and nearly unreadable of art critics, which is saying something. Ruskin, to his misfortune, famously failed to grasp the value of the work of the American-born Whistler, regarding him as a dabbling provocateur. I recalled how British critics later missed the boat again when the Abstract Expressionists sailed into Europe. Considering that Britain's current condition seems like mania to an American visitor, maybe trans-Atlantic communication always breaks down both ways.
Perspective was sought via a brief escape to Paris, where the renovated Pompidou Center, less ballyhooed than the new Tate, lays out modern art via a finer collection in endless rooms along a central corridor that seems to vanish to infinity. It looked outstanding. Another wait in line was required to enter, but Paris seemed blessedly quiet, unassuming and provincial after bustling London, a respite.
Among the buskers and sketch artists on the plaza in front of the museum, a Japanese guitarist, a regular there, serenaded English and German girls who smoked Gauloises conspicuously. Upstairs in the rooftop restaurant, where the waiters dress like undertakers and the dour D.J. blares Euro pop, young lovers in bell-bottom pants and thick-soled shoes shared expensive salads. The view was surpassing.
I decided that maybe this is the age in which art and art museums, not just in London, have devolved into mere entertainment suppliers. But from atop the Pompidou, with Paris spread out below, the current state of affairs didn't seem altogether without its up side.
