Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art

 

Today artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and the Chapman brothers are not only big business but also, quite simply, celebrities. But they rose from obscurity back in the 1980s and 1990s in a then-semi-derelict part of east London by visiting upon the art world a set of artworks as outlandish and attention-seeking—not to mention scatological—as their general behavior. This is the first account of how the YBAs (Young British Artists) came about, by the group’s only "embedded journalist"—an outrageously comic tale of White Cube gallery openings, fights in pubs, vomiting into fountains and, eventually, the breakthrough 1997 exhibition Sensation which later toured to New York and was criticized by Guiliani. Throughout, Gregor Muir was there.