You ask the questions

(Such as: so, Gavin Turk, Young British Artist, where would you and your friends be without the support of Charles Saatchi? And is Hoxton really as fashionable as they say?)

Wednesday, 31 January 2001

The artist Gavin Turk, 33, famously failed his MA course at the Royal College of Art when he displayed a blue English Heritage plaque with his name on it for his degree show. He is best known for his full-size sculpture Pop - a waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious - which was bought by Charles Saatchi and shown as part of the epoch-making Sensation exhibition. Turk is a leading member of the YBAs, or Young British Artists, a group that includes Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. He has had a number of solo exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London and has just completed a project on Che Guevara, as part of Year of the Artist, in which he advertised for "revolutionaries" to take part. His work is showing at the Century City exhibition, which opens tomorrow at Tate Modern. Gavin Turk lives in east London with his partner and three children.

The artist Gavin Turk, 33, famously failed his MA course at the Royal College of Art when he displayed a blue English Heritage plaque with his name on it for his degree show. He is best known for his full-size sculpture Pop - a waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious - which was bought by Charles Saatchi and shown as part of the epoch-making Sensation exhibition. Turk is a leading member of the YBAs, or Young British Artists, a group that includes Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. He has had a number of solo exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London and has just completed a project on Che Guevara, as part of Year of the Artist, in which he advertised for "revolutionaries" to take part. His work is showing at the Century City exhibition, which opens tomorrow at Tate Modern. Gavin Turk lives in east London with his partner and three children.

Which member of the "Britpack" artists would be best to go drinking with, and why? Lisa Waldron, Gloucester

All of them, all together, all at the same party. It would be sweet, smoochy, stupid and probably very nostalgic. I've just had a third child so socialising these days has to come to me. Things have moved on and we've all grown up a bit.

Do you think you'll be an artist for the rest of your life? How difficult is it to sustain such a persona, and do you fear the day you run out of ideas? Terry Maybury, London

I look forward to the day I run out of ideas because that will be the day that I'll feel gratified and resolved. That will be the moment when I have succeeded.

Your work often concerns itself with rather corny icons of the 20th century - Sid Vicious, Che Guevara, Elvis Presley etc. Are you an adolescent fantasist? Nick Codeman, Surrey

I think "corny" is the wrong word; "clichéd" would be more appropriate. I am a reporter on cultural fantasy and I think that clichés harbour some sort of truth. The reason why a cliché comes about is because there's an agreement between a great many people that such and such a thing is good. It may be good for varying reasons but that decision has still been made.

I heard that you were dead. How did this happen and when? K Leslie, Oxford

That sounds like a vicious rumour.

What do you dream about? Have you ever dreamt up an art work? Lisa Saunders, by e-mail

Like everyone else, I dream about unthinkable things. Your dreams are the time you get when you can join things together and not have to follow any kind of conscious stream of thought. Sometimes I dream about my work and quite often I have dreamt up whole exhibitions or various pieces of work, none of which I've actually gone on to make.

Without Charles Saatchi, you and the YBAs would be nothing. True or false? Sussanah Warren, Brighton

I don't know. Yes. To date, he's my biggest collector.

You recently produced a bin liner made out of bronze. Why? T Robinson, by e-mail

It's a similar thing to when you have a baby - the smaller the baby, the bigger the bag of stuff you have to carry around with you. When humans create matter they also create anti-matter - and so a bin liner becomes the symbol of everything humans need to discard. There's also the thing of people having their litter bags rifled through in order to find out about their life. What people throw away says a lot about their life.

Of whom would you like to do a nude study? Nicholas E Gough, Swindon

I'm not in the business of studying nudes for art.

What reaction did you get to your work on Che Guevara - and why him? Colin Lobley, Hertfordshire

I got a very varied reaction, but it was all surprisingly positive. I published my phone number in various newspapers asking people to participate and didn't receive one negative call. It was a great opportunity to be able to think about a whole variety of things - from simple corporate logos to international politics - and whether those things are actually any different. I was trying to say that some images have a political content that can be missed. Che Guevara - and especially the Alberto Korda image of him - is a catalyst, or a reason, for looking at and thinking about Third World politics, revolution and, by inference, our own political or cultural position.

Your Blue Plaque famously failed you your Royal College MA. Have you seen your tutors since then? If so, what do you have to say to them? Kate Mair, London

I recently met up with Christopher Frayling, who's now Rector of the Royal College, and he asked me whether I still had any of the souvenir plaques because he really wanted to buy one to put up in the senior common room. I just said I didn't have any left.

Was Sensation really the defining moment in the history of contemporary art that people tend to make out? Thomas May, Liverpool

Sensation was basically an exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection, showing the work of young artists taking place in the historically traditional confines of the Royal Academy. It was simply a meeting of the old and the new, but the whole thing became a media circus because of Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley painting. I don't think it was necessarily a turning point, though; a lot of things had already happened and the groundwork was already laid.

Who are your favourite and least favourite artists and why? Colin Favers, by e-mail

That's a hard one. When I started at art college I thought having favourites would help me to identify what was good and bad art, but as I continued to learn more I realised that it's not that. Now I have no more facility to judge good or bad art but I do have a more sophisticated understanding of the language of art.

Is it true that you had a waxwork on show in the Dome? Wasn't that a bit naff? Clare Baldini, London

I was commissioned to make a sculpture for the Mind Zone. It was based on a Magritte painting and was called Smokey Joe. It was a self portrait, with pipes sticking out of the face heated in such a way that through a smoke-filled cabinet it could be detected by an infrared camera. I went to the Dome just before it closed down with my kids, and I think we all enjoyed it for many different reasons. In the end, it had such bad press that it was always going to be very problematic.

What do your children think of your work and what would you say if your children said they wanted to be artists too? K Myerson, Stockport

They like it, or at least they say they like it, but I don't think they put it into the same category as other artworks. They've grown up with a lot of art around them and they like art generally, but they see that as different to the stuff I do. They have a slightly dislocated relationship with it. If they said they wanted to be artists, I'd just say "Are you sure?" I would encourage them to follow their interests, but I wouldn't want them to feel under any obligation to do it just because I do.

Is Hoxton really as fashionable as they say? Pete Hayward, by e-mail

Yes, it is still trendy, it really is. It's flash. It is fashion.

What can be learned from contemporary art forms such as unmade beds, faecal paintings, and halved animals? Nicholas E Gough, Swindon

I'm not sure whether the lessons learnt from these three things are the same. The works are too different. Tracey Emin's work is about her ability to share her emotions through visual and written language. Chris Offili's paintings are about ethnicity. And Damien Hirst's work is about isolated cultural elements and modern problems.

Where do you get your waxworks made? E Baton, Cardiff

They get made in my studio, and over the years I've had various different people assisting me. It's a very technical job, but it's very important to me to feel that I have made them myself. It's not a particularly creative job. What's interesting for me is the phenomenon of waxworks and sculpture and the cultural position it occupies historically. It's not fine art - it's popular art, which is why Madame Tussauds is London's most popular tourist attraction.

If I wanted to spot a hot new artist, who could make me a few quid, where should I be looking and can you recommend any one artist in particular? C Jacklin, London

Cedar Lewishon; he's my assistant. He's a good writer and a DJ.

Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis opens tomorrow at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8000)

Photography develops its self-doubt

I am a Camera | Saatchi Gallery, London

Charles Darwent on Art
Sunday, 14 January 2001

When a Parisian photographer named Warnod showed a work called Ships Entering the Port of Le Havre in 1862, the Revue Photographique ran a wet tongue over pointy teeth. Casting a lupine glance at Claude Monet - who was in the process of painting the same scene himself - the magazine observed that Warnod's image had "just as much harmony as the canvases of the most highly esteemed painters, and an absolute truth which artists of the utmost genius would be powerless to attain". The heirs of Messrs. Monet and Warnod have spent the subsequent 140 years slugging it out, and a new show at the Saatchi Gallery suggests that they're at it still.

When a Parisian photographer named Warnod showed a work called Ships Entering the Port of Le Havre in 1862, the Revue Photographique ran a wet tongue over pointy teeth. Casting a lupine glance at Claude Monet - who was in the process of painting the same scene himself - the magazine observed that Warnod's image had "just as much harmony as the canvases of the most highly esteemed painters, and an absolute truth which artists of the utmost genius would be powerless to attain". The heirs of Messrs. Monet and Warnod have spent the subsequent 140 years slugging it out, and a new show at the Saatchi Gallery suggests that they're at it still.

The contest has not been entirely one-sided. Monet may have sat down grim-faced at the easel to ape photography's quickness and objectivity - le style Kodak even found some impressionists making paintings that looked like photographs - but the relationship had changed by the time Chuck Close came along a hundred years later. Instead of being special, photography had become anti-special.

The billions of images we regularly consume by way of the camera had not simply democratised the whole idea of image-making, but had debased it. Close's photorealist portraits were painted in a spirit of anxiety rather than of homage, and he was not alone. You might argue that the phenomenological doubt about what we see and how we see it that underlies most recent art - Postmodernism, the ironising of the YBAs, those oh-so-naive snapshots of Wolfgang Tillmans - is underpinned by a 150-year-old unease about the banalising influence of photography: an unease that has recently begun to be as worrisome to photographers as it has been to artists.

Which could have turned Saatchi's "I am a Camera" into a curatorial mess, with any old thing thrown in to fit an impossibly broad brief. That the first artwork you see in the show is not a two-dimensional piece at all but one of Duane Hanson's uncanny waxworks - the disconsolate-looking Man on a Bench - fills you with foreboding. What has this got to do with cameras?

To tell the truth, the answer is: nothing, or at least nothing at first. By the time you leave the show, though, you'll see that Hanson's waxen Sad Sack is all to do with ideas of authenticity - about the differences between realism and reality - that are themselves bound up with questions about how we have come to view truth in a photographic world.

This realisation comes about through the clever interweaving of images in "I am a Camera". On the photographic side, the show displays all kinds of internal self-doubts. Nan Goldin's Thanksgiving series is made up of consciously snappy snapshots of Americans doing those things they do on the titular day in question (mainlining heroin, blacking each other's eyes, showing off hysterectomy scars and masturbating to camera, apparently). At the same time, though, Goldin's poppy vox pop demands to be taken as art. It's framed, it's hung as a formal installation and - in case it had escaped your attention - it's in an art gallery.

By contrast, Tierney Gearon's Technicolor shots of her children - they ski! they take Tuscan holidays! they swim in the Caribbean! - subvert the family snap by hinting at darker goings-on beneath its glossily neutral surface. Gearon's golden-haired moppets have had early lessons in gender stereotyping. The little girl lolls Lolita-like with hand on hip while the little boy gazes at roadkill through a wolf mask, wee-wees in the snow and - will Professor Freud please pick up a white courtesy 'phone - stands naked on a pedestal before an adoring matron.

For their part, the show's painters have a less compelling take on things. The young Los Angeles artist, Kristin Calabrese, takes a predictable swipe at the banalising powers of photography by painting sort-of-photorealist pictures of banal American interiors: shag-pile carpets, wood veneer walls, 'fridge magnets - you know the sort of thing. Both Calabrese's dated Brady Bunch decor and her mode of working suggest that things in painting really haven't moved on much since 1969 and Chuck Close, a feeling that is reinforced by Jason Brooks' copies of Close's work circa 1969. ("I love that period and nobody's doing it now," rationalises Brooks, with winning candour.)

Of course, another way of looking at it is to say that Brooks is simply following in Close's footsteps by out-Closeing him. Close's appropriation of photography in the 1960s raised all kinds of Warholish questions about the value of originality in an age of mechanical image-making. Brooks's appropriation of Close in the 1990s asks the same question again, but this time with an in-built tiredness that makes you wonder whether painting, in emulating it, hasn't become as mechanistic as photography. Or, just possibly, more so.

* 'I am a Camera': Saatchi Gallery, NW8 (020 7624 8299), 18 January to 25 March.

Great savings, Great art.

Wednesday, 10 January 2001

For everyone who loves art and visiting galleries, The Independent has produced The Independent Art Card giving you great savings every month on different exhibitions and art offers.

For everyone who loves art and visiting galleries, The Independent has produced The Independent Art Card giving you great savings every month on different exhibitions and art offers.

This month, January 2001, you can save up to £50 with our exclusive Art Card offers. This card is valid throughout the year and each month, new galleries and exhibitions will come on board.

The card will inserted in The Independent and The Independent on Sunday on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th January. It will be valid throughout the year with a range of discounts and different offers available every month. You could save up to £50 in January alone.

Galleries/Exhibitions involved in January are

Art2001

The Victoria and Albert Museum

Tate Liverpool

Saatchi Gallery

Barbican Gallery

Tate Britain

National Portrait Gallery

Hampton Court Palace

And WIN!

All Art Card holders who send their details to The Independent have the chance to win a limited edition Gary Hume print. This competition is open until 28th February 2001.

How he turned his body into art

First he cast his head in his own blood. Now he's showing DNA extracted from his sperm. Rose Aidin meets artist Marc Quinn

Sunday, 26 November 2000

I've given up imagining what Young British Artists are going to be like before I meet them - like their work, they invariably surprise in the flesh. Yet if any one should seem familiar it is Marc Quinn, who has consistently used his own body in his work. A cast of his head filled with eight pints of his own blood (the average amount in the human body) titled Self and first made in 1991, caused fainting fits when exhibited at the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show in 1997.

I've given up imagining what Young British Artists are going to be like before I meet them - like their work, they invariably surprise in the flesh. Yet if any one should seem familiar it is Marc Quinn, who has consistently used his own body in his work. A cast of his head filled with eight pints of his own blood (the average amount in the human body) titled Self and first made in 1991, caused fainting fits when exhibited at the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show in 1997.

Quinn is the original and, some say, the best Young British Artist. Born in 1964, he studied History and History of Art at Cambridge University. Aged 24, he was the first artist shown by YBA impresario Jay Jopling and when Self was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 1993 the Evening Standard described Quinn as "London's most talked about young artist".

However, instead of the ruthless individual you might expect from his visceral work, Quinn is dapper - dressed in shiny shoes, designer felt trousers and crisp white textured shirt - gentle and almost cuddly. Like his fellow YBAs of the Saatchi years, he is extremely self-knowing and over-flows with ideas yet, unlike them, he has renounced their trademark hard living.

Quinn was in the grip of full-blown alcoholism when Self was shown at the Saatchi Gallery. "I was unable to capitalise on the publicity because my personal life was in such chaos," he recalls. "I had to sort that out to get to work." Quinn's struggle with addiction has been imprinted on him since then: "When I stopped drinking I became aware that it was all about living in this continuous present and it ends because that's not possible."

In 1995 Quinn showed Emotional Detox: The Seven Deadly Sins at the Tate. Made of toxic lead and cast from his own body, the sculptures explicitly express his internal agony - Quinn describes them as his most autobiographical work. "I still do Alcoholics Anonymous ... It keeps your feet on the ground; you remember the reality of [alcoholism]." In the last couple of years, he has moved on to create a new body of work which goes on show at White Cube² this week (and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in January), and features in a South Bank Show next month.

"Giving up drinking has given me an enormous lust for life," explains Quinn. "Addiction is like a broken record, you just keep repeating the same thing: you can see what you're doing but you're caught in a vicious circle ... Now I've stopped using myself in my work because I got bored and wanted to give it a rest, that's why I'm doing sculptures of other people, flowers and abstract work."

Earlier this year Quinn undertook his most ambitious project yet, Garden, a walk-in steel chamber containing a tank lined with luscious flowers that are frozen in 25 tons of chilled silicon. "What I love about my flower sculptures is that they seem untransformed, it's almost a parallel reality," he says. "You've got this paradox because when they're dead - frozen in silicone - they seem to be alive and perfect, but it's only if the power is turned off and they start petrifying that they're actually alive again. These beautiful flowers are really about death."

Like Self and many of Quinn's sculptures, the survival of Garden relies upon maintaining an extremely specific temperature and condition. White Cube² will show Reincarnate (1999), a vase cast in the artist's blood with an orchid at its centre, while a vase of flowers also frozen in silicon, Eternal Spring (red) of 1988, is part of the Hayward Gallery's current "Spectacular Bodies" exhibition.

"All the frozen sculptures are about dependence," comments Quinn. "They're so demanding technically, they drive you and the person who owns the work completely insane. But beauty has its own reason, and once you put the flowers in you'll forgive the sculptures anything. There's a kind of madness to it which is part of the meaning of the work: the inappropriate amount of effort which in a way is what life is about - they can only exist in our kind of society."

Garden is stored at the Prada Foundation in Milan, but White Cube² will show Quinn's large paintings of the work made using a Thirties photographic technique which incorporates the hallucinogenic colours of permanent car pigments. "The paintings refreeze the garden in another way," argues Quinn. "Because they're of real flowers they tend to seduce you into thinking it's a real place, then you realise that an orchid is next to an artichoke and so completely unnatural. They're beautiful but also rather nauseating. Like eating a million sweets, you get this intense desire and then you want to throw up. As with Dorian Gray, the idea is that if you look at something perfect, then there's got to be something imperfect, and that imperfection is you."

While working on Garden, Quinn began a series of life-size models of amputees - those who have lost or were born without limbs. Inspired by the lost limbs of classical sculptures, Quinn made casts of his subject's bodies then passed them to an Italian workshop to be sculpted in marble. Next year, his eight sculptures, a group portrait made between 1999-2000, will stand next to Canova's Three Graces at the Victoria & Albert Museum; White Cube² will show a sculpture of a disabled woman eight months pregnant, and one with her able-bodied baby.

How does Garden relate to these sculptures? "I like paradoxes," answers Quinn. "Beauty is an amazing thing that you can use to get under people's skins, to deliver a missile. These marble sculptures are incredibly beautiful, but they're also about a challenging subject. People are seduced by the beauty of the sculpture, and that makes them face something that they can normally avoid."

Quinn will also show his own DNA in a test-tube, extracted from his sperm and preserved in alcohol: there is no avoiding addiction in Quinn or his work. "Substance abuse is about abstracting yourself from the real world, about stopping time, and all the themes of my work are there," he explains. "You kind of die and are reborn each day, every morning is Genesis and every night is Revelation. If you're aware of all these things then you love life all the more: that's partly why I use beauty, it's so egalitarian, yet it also has another level if you want to find it."

'Still Life': White Cube², N1 (020 7930 5373), Friday to 6 January, 2001; 'Give and Take': Serpentine Gallery, W2 and Victoria & Albert, SW7 (020 7298 1515), 30 January to 1 April; 'South Bank Show': 17 December, ITV, 10.45pm

New York is aflutter as Hirst's butterflies make a record $750,000

By Jojo Moyes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Thursday, 16 November 2000

Damien Hirst's artistic takeover of New York continued yesterday with the news that one of his works has achieved a record-breaking price at auction.

Damien Hirst's artistic takeover of New York continued yesterday with the news that one of his works has achieved a record-breaking price at auction.

In Love - Out of Love, a diptych with butterflies affixed to a background of pink on one side and blue on the other, sold for $750,500 (£540,000) at a sale of contemporary art at Phillips, New York.

It far exceeded the previous auction world record of $552,500 for a Hirst, set in New York last May. Another work by Hirst consisting of cigarette butts in a wooden and glass vitrine, entitled Dead Ends Died Out, Examined, also far exceeded its pre-sale estimate, with a sale price of $508,500.

The sale marks the culmination of three months of success for Hirst in the US, where he held his first solo exhibition in five years at New York's Gagosian Gallery - and sold every piece.

The opening night, attended by such luminaries as Steve Martin, Martha Stewart and Salman Rushdie, prompted a near riot, and left Hirst the toast of New York's glitterati.

The auction price is not the highest price ever achieved for a Hirst work - Charles Saatchi recently purchased Hymn for $1.5m. But according to James Rawlin, head of twentieth century pictures at Phillips London, the steady increase in the value of Hirst's work makes him unusual. "For a contemporary artist to be selling work on what's a fairly short turnaround for such big prices is remarkable," he said. "I was at New York on Monday for the sale and it was very exciting - not just two bidders battling it out, but a wide-ranging interest from collectors all over the world."

He said the key to Hirst's increasing status at auction was the consistent quality of his work over the past 10 years. "A lot of the work from his contemporaries is already starting to look a bit dated and gimmicky. That's not happening with Hirst, and that's what people are responding to," he said.

Mr Rawlin said that the buzz created by the Gagosian exhibition had helped Hirst's sale prices. "It helps to establish his position as a blue chip name. He's far and away the most successful of his generation of British artists."

Phillips London will sell another of Hirst's works next week, an untitled "butterfly" picture.

What's This About Cultural Pollution?

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: November 5, 2000

WHILE Hollywood executives were professing before a Senate committee not long ago to be shocked, shocked, that somehow R-rated slasher movies like ''I Know What You Did Last Summer'' were being test-marketed to 9-year-olds, the news arrived from London that Tracy Emin, the popular British artist, had unveiled ''I've Got It All.''

Ms. Emin has made herself internationally known in art circles in recent years in shows like ''Sensation'' and, most famously, with pithy confessional installations entailing soiled underpants, cigarette butts, empty vodka bottles and used condoms. Her latest work, at London's Saatchi Gallery, includes a big photograph of herself splay-legged, giving birth to a wad of cash -- the currencies, you might note, hailing from the countries where she has had exhibitions.

We'll take a pass on that particular bait to note that among the so-called Young British Artists, Ms. Emin is said to be a favorite with teenagers. This is a new art demographic and the same one, more or less, coveted by films like ''I Know What You Did Last Summer,'' wherein a serial-killing maniac wields a gigantic ice hook.

Vice President Al Gore has used the phrase ''cultural pollution'' in the presidential debates, and on the eve of the presidential election on Tuesday the culture question raised during the campaign hangs in the air: Is civilization really going down the tube?

No. And let's stop repeating this nonsense before we actually come to believe it. Popular culture is getting more and more juvenile, and the serious arts, or what used to be the serious arts, often emulate popular culture, depressingly. But we can be disappointed in our arts without being made coarser as a society. There's a difference. Why as a nation do we periodically presume that society is coarsened by culture? That's the real question. Why does history keep repeating itself like this?

The 1990's were a decade of change, not a particularly great decade for the arts but a period of change. We ought to look clearly at what is new and what is not. Here is a modest, partial attempt.

The change has been partly technological: the Internet, cable television and VCR's changing the way we see, making culture's intake more private, our encounter with offensive art seemingly more invasive and our reaction more alienated. Meanwhile, we have become more prosperous. And movies, like much of the rest of commercial culture and too much high art, are exploring new depths of silliness and crudity, the junk piling higher than ever because we have more money than ever to spend on making and consuming it.

But at the moment we live in blissful, some might even say sanitized, contradiction to the perception that culture has coarsened American life. Affluence multiplies everything now. There are more Jane Austen movies. More art museums. More people going to them.

There may actually be less sex in movies than there has been in 20 years, and it could be argued that the violence, while more graphic, is less real, more comic-bookish. Hit movies have become, if anything, less forthright and more squeamish when it comes to genuine political or social conflict.

We also may expect more of culture than we used to, or at least we want more from it than it can provide. Peace and prosperity, long desired, turn out to be dandy only up to a point. Culture, a vague catchall, makes a ready target for what else we think is missing in life. It is a convenient punching bag for what rising stock prices and crime-free streets do not in the end provide. In the luxury of our booming economy, we have plenty of extra leisure time in which to complain about what culture is failing to do.

The demise of popular culture is anecdotally linked to the deluge of mayhem flicks, gay-bashing jokes in blockbusters like ''Scary Movie,'' onscreen flatulence gags and gross-out humor in bombs like ''Ready to Rumble,'' mass-murder video games like ''Doom,'' bondage dot-com sites, ''Survivor'' and trash-talking television cartoons like ''South Park.'' These pop phenomena have combined with what used to be the boutique category of fine art to include big, noirish paintings of female corpses and dung-adorned collages of the Virgin Mary.

The only surprise of the Senate hearings in September wasn't that Columbia Tristar tried to sell an advertisement on Nickelodeon, the children's network, for ''The Fifth Element,'' a movie involving gun battles and a talk-show host performing cunnilingus on a guest singer. The surprise was that the senators seemed to expect the public to believe that it would really be possible to sequester children from ads for movies like that.

Just walk through tourist-friendly Times Square these days. The huge Disney-affiliated ABC billboard flashes steamy video clips from daytime soaps in front of the teenagers who cluster below MTV's studio windows and line up at the World Wrestling Federation store for Chyna to sign copies of her spread in Playboy. Nobody reasonably expects to keep dry standing in the midst of a deluge.

We are more cynical these days. Bad art and craven art marketers breed disaffected consumers, in a downward spiral. In art galleries and at great public establishments like the newly hip-hop Brooklyn Museum and the Armani-sponsored Guggenheim, commercial fashion and pseudotransgressive button-pushing in emulation of Hollywood trigger our stony indifference. We roll our eyes. No one wants to seem like a rube -- a defensive response, which in the end is self-anesthetizing. Our reaction to pandering and provocation in museums has become something akin to compassion fatigue, to our numbed reaction to seeing too much violence on the network news.

And indifference is willed blindness, which can mute deserved outrage. Arts critics know that one of the purposes of modern art has been to make us uneasy, the arts, unlike battlefields or brokerage houses, being wonderfully benign sites on which to thrash out our different values.

When sensationalism, a cheap effect, substitutes for truly disturbing art seriously presented, we should be deeply bothered. But arts critics, aware of art's punching-bag role, can often be too close to the arts or too defensive of them, and maybe a little too worried about peer pressure, to express disappointment whenever it is felt, in part fearing another ''Bosley 'Bonnie'-Brook,'' as a 1967 headline in Variety put it. Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic then, having failed to see the point of ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' wrote that it was just ''another indulgence of a restless and reckless taste, and an embarrassing addition to an excess of violence on the screen.'' Other people recognized the film to be a sign of generational shift, a seismic change attuned to the youth culture in the middle of the Vietnam War. By the end of that year, Mr. Crowther decided to retire.

Generational shift can be especially hard to perceive from the caboose end, which increasingly locates the baby boomers. During the 1960's and 70's, America reflected young boomers' preoccupation with sex and social freedom. In the 80's it was a maturing generation's desire for money and security. Now it's a middle-aged group's inevitable alarm about uncontrollable global change. Baby boomers ceding control to succeeding generations risk confusing lost authority with perceptions of social entropy. Cries of civilization's breakdown have historically been a stand-in for displaced anxieties about other things.

ANXIETY about technological change, for instance. During the 1920's, the proliferation of movie theaters -- which you could call a technological phenomenon like the spread of personal computers, cable television stations and video machines in the 1990's -- provoked a spasm of sociological reports, Senate hearings, speeches from the pulpit and media speculation about the collapse of American cultural standards and the resulting corruption of America's children.

Scientists stuck electrodes to teenagers to try to measure the psychic effects of watching sex and violence in movies, failing to ask whether similar reactions might have been caused by, say, reading dime novels or Walter Scott adventures. Parents feared they couldn't control the new medium by which their children, whose movie intake averaged around two a week, were learning about the world from unscrupulous movie moguls via Rudolph Val entino. Chicago, whose Tribune editorialized several times against the corrupting effects of Valentino, even enacted film censorship laws, pointlessly. A Hollywood executive noted that the city of Al Capone had become the ''nicest, cleanest, most orderly, crimeless city in the world today.''

Each generation has repeated this self-delusional process, usually around election time. In the 50's the scourge was comic books, ruining children's mental health. By the 60's it was television, now in nearly every home. Then at one exquisite moment in 1972, when porn theaters had not yet been made obsolete by the video revolution, the two most popular films in the country were ''The Godfather'' and ''Deep Throat,'' to widespread consternation. The term ''porno chic'' was coined to describe the lines of celebrities, dating couples and suburbanites at places like the grubby World Theater on 49th Street in Manhattan, where ''Deep Throat'' earned millions of dollars in its first few weeks.

''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' which you could call the godfather of ''I Know What You Did Last Summer,'' came out two years later. And by the 1980's pop sociologists were warning that boomboxes blasting Run-DMC over the din of rumbling subway cars portended the final ignominious breakdown of civil society, which was around the same time that Slayer's album ''Reign in Blood'' reached the charts with a song serenading Josef Mengele.

Then boomboxes declined, fashionably displaced by the technological revolution of the CD Walkman. Problem solved.

Now it's intrusive cell phones and road rage as social analogues of such evil cultural phenomena as women-hating rap lyrics and foul speech on ''reality-based'' television shows. Altogether they signal our dissolution -- for real this time, the doomsayers insist, never mind the news about plummeting rates of crime, teen pregnancy and divorce. Coarsening culture begets uncivil action, so the knee-jerk argument always goes, which was the underlying point of the Senate hearings last month and in the 1920's. Even so, for good reason senators in the recent hearings stopped short of claiming that violent art causes violent behavior, because by now everyone knows that the facts don't reliably support the rhetoric.

One man's civility is invariably another's hell, of course. Dan Quayle, running for re-election, railed against ''Murphy Brown'' for its lack of ''family values'' but said nothing about the body count in Arnold Schwarzenegger's ''Total Recall.'' In the 1950's, road rage wasn't yet a documented risk on Los Angeles's comparatively unclogged freeways, but blacks had to sit at the back of public buses in the South. And before then, people didn't talk dirty in mixed company, but they would spit on the sidewalk and, if they were polite, into spittoons -- which were everywhere, like the ashtray until it, too, was banished in most public places by a society that one could argue is more, not less, compliant, conformist and docile than it has ever been. When was the last time you saw a ''No Spitting'' sign in a New York subway station? Was it the last time you sat in a subway car plastered with obscene graffiti?

We may be too polite. American disenchantment with negativism of any kind in campaigns this political season, the polls tell us, has caused people to balk at candidates who simply don't seem personable enough, policies aside.

On the culture front, laudably forthright depictions of difficult social issues have diminished, in cautious commercial aversion to causing public offense. I wonder, for example: although Hollywood might still give an R rating to ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High'' (1982) if the movie were to be made today, would the producers be as explicit about teenage abortion?

Here's an odd thought. History, as the sociologist Norbert Elias famously detailed, shows that explicit sex and violence -- talking to little children about sex, exalting people who kill -- have been the norms of Western civilization, Victorianism and its legacy being the exception. One wonders whether we are currently wrestling with what is our natural condition, to which popular culture is rudely returning.

What's not old but unprecedented is how on the technical side we receive images, a factor that may partly affect the impression of moral downward mobility. Films in the 60's and 70's could be incredibly violent (''A Clockwork Orange,'' after some editing, and ''The Wild Bunch'' both got R ratings and provoked outcries about society's terminal moral decline), but people sat together in movie houses to watch them, bracketing the experience from the rest of life.

People still go to movies and concerts in droves. But now they often pop videos into VCR's, flip channels on the remote and log on to the Net, at home, alone. Adults and children. The cultural experience has become more private and isolated, a civilizing challenge, because, except for reading, culture's civilizing power has always had something to do with the fact that people generally gathered together for it.

Visual art remains a partial exception, too, in the sense that most people can't afford to experience it in the privacy of their homes -- but these days it manages to be alienating in its own special ways.

As an art critic, I struggle to parse the difference between a used condom and an old urinal. An 83-year-old urinal. Think about that. Marcel Duchamp acquired his porcelain provocation in 1917 from a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, signed it R. Mutt and submitted the now infamous ''Fountain'' to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, from which it was acrimoniously excluded. As he had no doubt expected, the society found the urinal beyond the pale.

''You mean to say if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas we would have to accept it?'' asked the artist George Bellow, incredulous.

''I'm afraid we would,'' replied Walter Arensberg, Duchamp's patron and champion, who had shopped with him for ''Fountain.''

How's that for prognostication?

But there is a difference between that urinal and condoms, contextually speaking. ''Fountain,'' in no sense autobiographical, arrived against the backdrop of the tradition of painting and sculpture, its incendiary effect having to do with its challenge to material precedent. It existed, like paintings and sculptures, still separated from the rest of the world within the confines of art, posing a question to art about whether to let the rest of the world in. ''Fountain'' was a urinal, but it was also something else in that situation, an artistic proposition.

The same pertained, more or less, when Warhol painted soup cans. But by now -- the lines between high and low having been virtually erased, the question about letting the world in having long ago been answered affirmatively -- a condom is a condom is a condom. Its value has only to do with the shock level of its confessional message, making it akin to the rapper Eminem's lyrics, and equally ephemeral. When art aspires to the general condition of pop culture (which we ought to lament as a compromise of civilized ambition rather than a sign of society's ruin), then that art, like most pop culture, can expect to have the shelf life of an average rap song.

There's good news. The past suggests that culture tends to be self-correcting in the long run, and counterintuitive in its influence. Robert Sklar, whose classic book, ''Movie-Made America,'' details the 1920's panic about film's corrupting effect, the other day mentioned his daughter to me: ''She was a film editor working on gory movies, and she didn't think twice about them until she became a mother, and now she can't bring herself to get near anything violent.''

I asked him what movies she grew up watching. ''If I recall,'' he said, '' 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' was one of her favorites.''

An artist? I'm a brand name, says Hirst

By Nick Glass and Cole Moreton
Sunday, 1 October 2000

His comeback show is the most successful seen in New York for years. Stars had to queue round the block to get into the opening, and the $11m worth of art inside has been sold already. But Damien Hirst admits he hardly lifted a finger to create any of it.

His comeback show is the most successful seen in New York for years. Stars had to queue round the block to get into the opening, and the $11m worth of art inside has been sold already. But Damien Hirst admits he hardly lifted a finger to create any of it.

"I don't think the hand of the artist is important on any level because you're trying to communicate an idea," says Hirst, the former BritArt enfant terrible who has become a world-wide critical and commercial phenomenon.

And Hirst has revealed that his next major work will be a huge pregnant woman with the foetus showing. It is being designed by the toy expert whose anatomical model was the basis for Hymn, the 20ft polychrome bronze that is the biggest of the 31 pieces on show in New York.

Critics pointed out that Hymn was little more than an enlargement of a model available in toy shops, but Hirst avoided a legal fight with the manufacturers Humbrol by agreeing to make donations to two children's charities. He also made a "goodwill payment" to the original designer, a 57-year-old commercial sculptor from Hertfordshire called Norman Emms. Despite having publicly admitted his disappointment at the size of the payment, Mr Emms is now working on the new woman for Hirst - although they have yet to meet face to face.

Charles Saatchi bought Hymn for an alleged £1m, and the collector has already expressed an interest in a piece whose working title must surely be Her.

More than 5,000 people turned up at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street last Saturday to see Hirst's first one-man show in three years. The actors Steve Martin and Milla Jovovich, Salman Rushdie, the designer Philippe Starck and the artist Jeff Koons were among those who had to wait in the street before being allowed past nightclub-style security. The title was "Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings".

The artist is utterly unapologetic that the only thing on display to which he has put a hand is an unfinished painting in a glass case called Concentrating on a Self-Portrait as a Pharmacist. "I can't believe that still comes up," he says. "It seems insane to me. Everybody's always done that."

Like Andy Warhol before him, and Jeff Koons now, he has a small factory of artists to turn his ideas into reality. The spot paintings worth $80-$300,000 were made in Leyton, East London. The spin paintings and pill cases in the show are products of Vauxhall, south of the Thames; and the rest was made at a third studio in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

The dozen or so workers include the artist's brother Bradley, who spent the last 15 months working on The Void, a cabinet containing 5,000 pills handcrafted out of lead, tin, pewter, plastic and resin. Three more are planned.

"I think becoming a brand name is a really important part of life," says Mr Hirst. "It's the world we live in. It's got to be addressed, understood and worked out, as long as you don't become your own idea of yourself, you don't start making Damien Hirsts."

His spot prints are offered on the Eyestorm website - three limited edition prints, Valium, Opium, and LSD, range in price from $750 to $3,000. His first book, I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, published by Booth-Clibborn in 1998, has sold 27,000 copies at £75 a time. A signed copy is £300.

Hymn should be coming home to Britain for Christmas, along with another new Saatchi purchase, Love Lost, a glass cabinet filled with water, a gynaecological couch, and 30 fish. Saatchi owns about 20 other Hirst pieces. To the disappointment of Tate Modern, the Hirst show here will be at the Saatchi Gallery in April.

Nicholas Glass is Arts Correspondent for Channel Four News. His report from New York will be broadcast tonight