Sensation lived up to its name. Hostile critics found fault with the yBas’ often crude or self-indulgent subject matter and their fixation with ‘shock art’. Traditionalists condemned the prevalence of conceptual installations in which the artist had played little part in personally crafting the work. Richard Cork had no time for such quibbles, delighting instead that ‘the rebels have stormed the bastions of conservatism’ and hoping that if this led to some Royal Academicians carrying out their threat to resign then so much the better since the institution ‘has spent much of the 20th century condemning the most vital impulses in modern art … The show’s arrival is a welcome sign that the Academy has belatedly decided to atone for its disgraceful, antiquated intolerance in the past.’ Cork even ranked Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost (a mould created of a typical London living room) as ‘among the classic British sculptures of the present century’.54
A media storm and the reaction of some of the public certainly suggested that art still had the power to shock. It was not just the tabloids and self-declared philistines that came to mock. Even Simon Jenkins thought the yBas’ work was rubbish:
Van Gogh famously wrote of his garbage dump: ‘My God, it was beautiful.’ But he portrayed garbage through the medium of his art. This exhibition (or most of it) takes garbage and, like the Dadaists, puts it in a museum. Art is merely a custodial function, an act of redefinition. The artist is a wordsmith.
… The stuff is mostly the usual mutilations, deformities, sex organs and banalities of the Adrian Mole school of sculpture. The catalogue clothes them in the pretension now obligatory for event art. They are ‘grizzly Gothic macabre’ or ‘post-colonial neo-Victorian’ or ‘a democracy of material and meaning’. If medicine or law described its work in the gibberish used by artists, half Britain would be dead or in jail.
Indeed, as far as Jenkins was concerned, Sensation appeared to be less about the content of what was on display than about the person who had given it meaning by purchasing it. The public were merely being asked ‘to admire Mr Saatchi’s taste, not because anyone can tell a good dead sheep from a bad one, but because Mr Saatchi says Mr Hirst is a good dead-sheep artist. He has sanctified objects and their finders or creators by the act of his patronage.’55
Similar objections were made, often by those with less artistic sensitivity than Simon Jenkins, to the works short-listed for the Turner Prize. During the nineties, public interest in this competition soared, thanks in part to Channel 4’s decision to turn it into a television event but also to the new market BritArt’s exponents had helped create. Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin became personalities in their own right – which in the latter’s case was appropriate given how much of her work was autobiographical. Her appearance, drunk on television drowning out with a string of obscenities Cork’s efforts to discuss modern art’s subtleties, only added to her renown. There was nonetheless a danger that the media interest was transforming the yBas from artists into celebrities whose personal antics were given as much attention as their creativity. For good or ill, art had certainly made itself relevant in this sense of catching the new millennial Zeitgeist of ‘celebrity culture’. Indeed, an audience existed not only to lap up exhaustive coverage of the lives and loves of modern artists and popular entertainers (or, at any rate, the image their publicists proffered) but even descended into the hero worship of the genuinely talentless publicity seekers who appeared on ‘reality television’ shows like Channel 4’s extraordinarily successful Big Brother. ‘This is television for its own sake, pure television,’ warned The Times’s critic, Paul Hoggart, even before the first series of Big Brother had begun. ‘It features people who are on television because they want to be on television, and who want to be on television because they want to be on television even more.’56 Undaunted, more Britons voted in the Big Brother contestant eviction nights than in the European parliamentary elections. Whether this was a verdict on Brussels or Britain was open to debate.
There were others who deplored the mixture of celebrity trappings and shock art that the Turner Prize appeared to promote in place of more meaningful expressionism. In The Times, the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro criticized the ‘anything goes’ attitude that tolerated what he regarded as the transient and self-indulgent quality of much of the younger generation’s work. The arts lobby was appalled at such effrontery, as if criticizing the new aesthetic orthodoxy was a form of heresy, and Caro’s office received several telephone calls from the Tate Gallery trying to get his remarks withdrawn.57 Caro had made his observations to Dalya Alberge, who had arrived at The Times from the Independent in 1994. As the new arts correspondent, it was her brief to cover stories of interest for the news pages. This proved a useful point of contact for those wishing to publicize the looming fate of endangered art works and several were saved as a direct consequence of their being brought to the attention of concerned Times readers. Yet the controversies of the contemporary art scene were never far away. On the day in which the 2000 Turner Prize winner was to be announced, Alberge accused one of the nominees of plagiarism. Glenn Brown’s giant canvas, The Loves of Shepherds, was an almost identical copy of Anthony Robert’s jacket illustration for a science fiction paperback novel of 1974.58
The Times did not just report on art, it helped make it. In 1998, the paper joined forces with Artangel to pay for a new work of art – the first occasion in which a national newspaper had commissioned an artwork from inception. Cork was on the panel that included Rachel Whiteread and Brian Eno to sift through seven hundred proposals. Trust was eventually placed in Michael Landy, a yBa whose work dealt with issues of modern consumerism. The resulting installation, entitled Breakdown, was three years in the planning and certainly caused a stir. During a fortnight in February 2001, Landy filled an empty former C&A department store in Oxford Street with all his personal possessions, more than seven thousand in all, ranging from his car, his art collection (which included works by Hirst and Emin), love letters and even his remaining postage stamps and the money in his bank account. ‘Everything Must Go’ posters on the windows gave a hint of what was about to happen to them. As 45,000 visitors filed through, Landy and a team of blue overall clad assistants placed each object on a moving assembly line, proceeding to smash them to pieces and put them through a shredder. A sizeable crowd formed outside watching the artist divest himself of all his worldly possessions. The end product finished up in a landfill site. At any rate, Landy had suffered for his art.
What was evident was the extent to which Britain entered the twenty-first century with London’s place in the firmament of contemporary visual art well established. It had become what New York had been in the 1970s and Paris in the more distant past. In Europe, the Venice Biennale was perhaps the major rival, although the variety of galleries and shows in London was without peer. Most of all, the success of Tate Modern was phenomenal. Cork was spoilt for choice. Beside the yBas, a slightly older generation of sculptors like Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor had risen to prominence. Yet, notwithstanding Gormley’s impressive Angel of the North near Gates-head and the construction of new modern galleries like nearby BALTIC (for which Cork voted in favour in his other guise as the chairman of the Arts Council’s visual arts committee) and the Lowry in Salford, British art remained predominantly associated with events in London. If anything, Cork was of the view that the process by which London sucked talent from elsewhere was accelerating.
When in 1998 Daniel Johnson departed for the Telegraph, Peter Stothard made the unorthodox appointment of himself as the new literary editor and for the next year managed to find the time to match books with reviewers while also editing the rest of the paper. Working for him was Erica Wagner who had arrived as Johnson’s secretary. Stothard was impressed by her knowledge and abilities and eventually appointed her to take the reins – although not before mischievously announcing at a staff party that he had finally agreed to step down from the job he had come to love, that of editor … literary editor. His knowledge an
d appreciation remained nonetheless. He expressed his admiration for Ted Hughes in moving comment articles he penned under his own name at the time of the Poet Laureate’s death and memorial services.59 Only months earlier he had broken one of London’s best-kept literary secrets when he revealed in The Times that Hughes had written an eighty-eight poem verse narrative, Birthday Letters, that chronicled his troubled relationship with Sylvia Plath. The paper also won the serialization rights of what Andrew Motion regarded as Hughes’s greatest work, ‘as magnetic as Browning’s poems for Elizabeth Barrett, as poignant as Hardy’s Poems 1912–13’.60
Despite the expertise and deep interest of Erica Wagner and Peter Stothard, it was dramatic rather than literary tour de forces that continued to receive daily attention in the paper. It was never going to be easy finding a replacement for Irving Wardle, who stepped down after twenty-seven years as The Times’s chief theatre critic in 1990, but Benedict Nightingale proved a worthy successor. Having spent the last few years in the United States, Nightingale was especially able to provide a fresh perspective on the state of British theatre. His mother, Evelyn, had been the first wife of Evelyn Waugh (he had sought revenge following their divorce by unfairly portraying her as Brenda Last in a Handful of Dust). After Charterhouse and the universities of Cambridge and Pennsylvania, Nightingale had embarked upon a career as a drama critic at the Guardian, New Statesman and New York Times followed by three years as Professor of English, Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan.
Returning to London, Nightingale despaired at the inability of playwrights to examine social and political attitudes unless through ‘reflex indignation and doctrinaire disapproval’. He feared that theatre had become insufficiently dangerous, that it was no longer, as Tom Stoppard said after seeing John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, ‘the place to be’.61 Nonetheless, while finding faults, Nightingale was enthusiastic about David Hare’s state-of-the nation trilogy scrutinizing the Church in Racing Demon, the legal system in Murmuring Judges and politics in The Absence of War which featured a People’s Party leader bearing distinct similarities to Neil Kinnock. He especially commended Stoppard’s Arcadia. Hare, Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Harold Pinter were playwrights with distinctive voices. This was lacking in the new generation emerging in the mid-1990s who were disengaged from the old ideologies and assumptions. If they had anything in common, it was what Nightingale dubbed their contribution to the ‘Theatre of Urban Ennui’. There was much to praise in the work of Jez Butterworth, Judy Upton and Patrick Marber. Doubt and less formulaic thinking appeared to be one solution to what Nightingale had previously condemned about the doctrinaire works that had predominated when he arrived back in London from the United States. But there was a concern that, as he put it, ‘the generation between the youthful Marbers and McDonaghs and Pinter, Stoppard and even Hare lacks distinction. Where is the dramatist large-minded enough to deal with the spiralling dilemmas produced by scientific progress, cultural globalisation, political nationalism and personal rootlessness?’ Indeed many of the best dramatists, like Conor MacPherson, Martin McDonagh and Billy Roche, hailed from across the Irish Sea.
Financially, some of the West End’s greatest successes during the decade came from musicals and revivals. Some saw the success of these forms of entertainment as evidence of how sickly British theatre had become – reduced to being fed on a drip by replaying dead playwrights’ back catalogues and by musicals that similarly relied on a compilation of hits from long defunct pop groups like Queen and Abba. Given the financial risks of staging in the West End, it was perhaps understandable that impresarios often preferred the tried and tested to risking all with an innovative work by an obscure hopeful. However, some revivals, like Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of An Inspector Calls, found a new resonance that was rightly rewarded and, as Nightingale observed, ‘in a reductionist era, when the psychological and behavourial sciences are annexing the human spirit, isn’t there something exhilarating in the size, imagination, verbal energy and moral fullbloodedness of, especially, the Greek, Jacobean and Spanish classics?’.62 In 1999 twenty-four million people visited the theatre in Britain, rather more than attended league football matches. The Almeida and the Donmar Warehouse rose to prominence, the latter finding an inspiring director in Sam Mendes. And while the RSC lurched into crisis under Adrian Noble, Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn, successive directors of the National Theatre, helped it go from strength to strength. Nightingale remained convinced that British theatre’s successes were made possible by state subsidy and, without it, there would be a collapse. This, he thought, was the main reason why the West End was more lively than its American equivalents. It was, as he also recognized, not the only reason. The British film industry was far less dominant than Hollywood. While the top American actors were sucked into movie making, British theatre audiences could still benefit from performances from great actors at the peak of their powers.
At the cinema, Hollywood production values certainly ensured that the nineties was the decade of large budgets and technologically advanced special effects. Both came together in James Cameron’s Titanic, which cost $200 million to make and confounded expectations that it would suffer the stricken liner’s fate. The world’s most expensive film became the world’s most profitable one. Men allegedly enjoyed it as a disaster movie while women supposedly were attracted to the love story at its heart. ‘Yet for all the sluggish script and the enormous weight of the special effects, this movie behemoth still has the power to shake us rigid and touch the soul,’ wrote The Times’s film critic, Geoff Brown.63 Yet all too frequently, spending on film making had come to exceed subtler considerations. By the end of the century, Hollywood’s average marketing budget per film had reached $25 million. Fittingly, a tiny budget horror movie, The Blair Witch Project, proceeded to gross among the most substantial receipts. Indeed, violent and often psychopathic behaviour played a starring role in many of the more noteworthy films of the decade with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – whose ‘very gusto keeps total nihilism at bay’ according to Brown – proving the most impressive.64
As the century drew to a close, Britain appeared to be providing many of the great actors but failing to make any serious challenge on Hollywood’s grip on production. Inadequate funding and lack of distribution rights remained gripes although when National Lottery money was invested it mostly subsidized commercial (and worse, artistic) flops. There were, of course, periodic triumphs when a film scored highly in both departments. Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, co-scripted by Tom Stoppard, received their due at the Oscars. The great commercial success was the 1994 romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral which helped turn its star, Hugh Grant, into the poster boy for England’s bumbling, self-effacingly witty English white upper-middle class. Brown admired the blend of ‘tart modern manners with old-fashioned romance’ and its bottling of the ‘key Merchant – Ivory ingredients: elegance, posh clothes, snob appeal’ alongside the repressed emotions displayed in Grant’s character. Others were less delighted. As with the Merchant-Ivory productions of E. M. Foster’s novels during the 1980s, that this was the image of Britain still being portrayed across the world to large and enraptured audiences only damned it further among those who wanted to see the country given a cooler, non-elitist, multi-ethnic, cutting-edge international profile. They were to be further antagonized when Four Weddings’s writer, Richard Curtis, followed up his success five years later with a similar format in Notting Hill. Less prone to post-imperial angst, the public, like the critic in The Times, Nigel Cliff, enjoyed the return, relieved that Hugh Grant was still on form, ‘playing Hugh Grant as only he can’.65
Yet Britain’s cinematic contribution to the nineties was not all floppy hair or period-piece corsetry. Working-class grit featured in the comedies Brassed Off and The Full Monty which dealt with the post-Thatcher, postindustrial landscape of the North of England with its threatened sense of comm
unity and punctured male pride, while East is East demonstrated there was a mainstream audience for a wry look at multicultural Britain. A film with the unpromising title of Trainspotting was the work that attained the greatest cult status. Directed by Danny Boyle from the novel by Irvine Welsh, it concerned the trials of four drug-abusing losers from the non-postcard side of Edinburgh with particularly plausible performances from Ewan McGregor who played Renton, the character attempting to go straight, and Robert Carlyle as the psychotic Begbie. Its amorality and ‘sense of life ripped from the gutters’ was not to Geoff Brown’s taste, although he accurately conceded that younger audiences would enjoy its adrenalin rush.66 By turns comic, endearing, revolting and surreal, Trainspotting blended fine acting, a quotable script, a hip soundtrack, a modicum of violence and all the tricks that also gave Tarantino such a transatlantic following – but with a Scots accent.
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