Just maybe my paintings will get there!

Next generation turns its back on Emin and Hirst's conceptual artworks

Tracey Emin is enjoying a retrospective at the Hayward, but the country's rising stars take a more practical approach

The reign of "the concept" in modern British art is finally over: long live "the object". As some of the former rebels of the notorious Young British Artist movement are accused of selling out to "the establishment", a new generation is taking their place, flaunting an altogether new aesthetic.

The freshest art on the contemporary scene appears to have turned its back on the ironic jokes and personal confessions epitomised by Tracey Emin's notorious unmade bed and Damien Hirst's dead floating shark. Emin's high-profile retrospective at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank may be pulling in the London crowds, but she alienated many of her peers last week by confirming her Tory sympathies and backing the government's latest round of arts cuts. Damien Hirst also ruffled some liberal feathers by happily rubbing shoulders with billionaires at the last Davos summit.

And as the most famous and iconoclastic of the YBAs start to lose their shine as role models, the art world's best-known curators and commentators claim a new earnestness is sweeping the country's better art schools and informing the work of their successors.

One of the biggest names in contemporary painting is on the shortlist for the coveted Turner prize this year. George Shaw, at 44, is roughly the same age as both Hirst or Emin yet is one of the leaders of the emerging "serious" tendency. Shaw concentrates on the oddly beguiling nature of ugly cityscapes with his watercolours and enamel paint studies. He insists that his work is not a reaction to the tricksy habits of the YBAs, but art critics beg to differ.

With his show, The Sly and Unseen Day, opening on Tuesday at the South London Gallery, the Coventry-born artist says he is bemused to find himself the centre of attention: "My work was not done as a response. It was a conversation I was having with myself. Then I noticed other people were interested and I had to pinch myself."

Shaw originally intended to become a performance artist and studied installation, photography, video and sound, before discarding it all. "I realised a lot of stuff I was doing was just rubbish. I was just adopting the same sort of things that had gone on before. So I went back to what I used to think at college, which was that the most shocking thing you could do would be to make a watercolour of a tree." At that point Shaw felt "an installation with a dead baby in it" had become the new conformity.

Other coming stars are both younger and, for now, relatively obscure. On Wednesday last week the annual Catlin art prize, which celebrates promising new work, was awarded to 22-year-old Russell Hill from Rugby. Hill works with everyday objects to expose the hidden threats or contradictions lying dormant in apparently banal things such as air fresheners or an oil can.

"The main thing for me is to make my work as articulate as possible in terms of themes and messages," Hill said yesterday. "I always maintain the function of the object. That's important to me. If I change an oil can, then it's not an oil can. If there are elements of ambiguity when people see it, I have to accept that."

He uses juxtaposition to point up his ideas about objects. So the "DIY nostalgia" of an item such as an oil can is coupled with fabric softener then displayed in a deliberately "clinical, harsh setting – like a hospital product".

"It is a piece about two lubricants," he explains. "There is a real sense of exploitation in my work. I tend to strip back objects and make people more aware of the underhand nature of the things that we see around us."

Hill's influences, he claims, come from abroad rather than from famous YBAs, although he acknowledges a debt to Martin Creed, the Scot who won the 2001 Turner prize with his flickering light in an empty room.

Justin Hammond, curator of the Catlin show and editor of the prize's guide, who spotted the artist at his degree show in Wimbledon, has found that many young art graduates are focusing on objects in the world around them.

"There's a lot more serious work in the past couple of years, a lot less jokey one-liners and less frivolity," he said. "Instead, there's a lot of work with statistics now, for example, and there are more real objects being used in sculpture. Russell's work is so precise, so clinical and so clean. It was obvious someone had obsessed over it. He was the unanimous choice this year."

Joanne Hummel Newell, who will be exhibiting her work at a satellite show at the Venice Biennale next month, is another artist excited by the significance of objects. The 28-year-old uses found items in combination with collage to make intriguing sculptures.

And one of the stars of next week's prestigious sculpture show, The Shape of Things to Come at the Saatchi Gallery in south-west London, is also known for shedding new light on items of rubbish. David Batchelor makes installations from things he has found on the streets of the capital then turns them into brightly coloured light boxes. His work is a mission to prove that left-overs can be made beautiful.

"When I make works from light boxes, or old plastic bottles with lights inside, I hope the illumination suspends their objecthood to some degree, and makes the viewer see them a little differently – see them as colours before seeing them as objects," he has explained. At 55, Batchelor, who is Scottish, has blazed a trail for this kind of practical sculpture, while the YBAs experimented with conceptual ruses.

Not all emerging artists have turned away from the Concept. For the first time, the Catlin prize line-up for 2011 included a performance artist, Leah Capaldi. For the show Capaldi sprays two actors with a bottle of Chanel perfume each before they walk off around the Tramshed gallery in Shoreditch, East London. "The idea came from when I was at the British Museum a while ago looking at a statue and a woman walked past me wearing so much perfume it was unbelievable. I found it stifling and had a real physical reaction; I had to walk to the other end of the gallery to get out of that space," she recalls.

Visitors to the Catlin show can judge the impact for themselves at noon today when Capaldi performs for the last time before the exhibition closes at 6pm.

For Sarah Ryan, director of online gallery Newbloodart, the prospect of spotting emerging new trends is appealing. Her yearly task of visiting 100 summer degree shows is just beginning.

"We have just started with Oxford Brookes at the weekend and noticed a lot of integrated work that brings in all the sensory aspects, a more multi-discipline approach. This is immersive work, using sculpture and sound and performance. Maybe it has something to do with all the technical advances going on around us that make this easier to do."

source: Guardian

aha, Hirst outdone!!

Love his work, and seeing this reminded me of the work by Jim Dine who's work I haven't had a look at for some time, me thinks I shall re -investigate his work

Jeff Koons overtook Damien Hirst to become the world's most expensive living artist at auction when his Hanging Heart sculpture fetched £11.3m at a Sotheby's sale in New York yesterday.
The 9ft-tall sculpture was created in stainless steel and consists of a giant heart, weighing 3,500lbs (1,600kg), suspended from the ceiling by two delicate gilded strands and hovering 16 inches (40cm) from the floor. The sculpture took 10 years to complete and was bought by the United States-based Gagosian Gallery. It is one of five uniquely coloured versions of the work from Koons' Celebration series.
The previous auction record was for Hirst's pill cabinet, Lullaby Spring, which sold for nearly £10m at Sotheby's in June. Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull, entitled For the Love of God, remains the most expensive creation by a living artist. It was sold for £50m in a private sale in August.
Koons, a Pennsylvanian who has gained as much notoriety as adulation for his artwork over the decades, is seen by some to have provided inspiration for the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s.
Gaining prominence in the 1980s, he set up a factory-like studio in the SoHo district of New York and employed more than 30 staff for help in producing his work, in a similar style to Andy Warhol's famous "Factory".
Much like Hirst's work would do a decade later, Koons's early conceptual sculptures shocked and delighted in equal measure, including his large stainless steel blow-ups of toys and a series entitled Banality, which culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a life-size, gold leaf-plated statue of the singer cuddling his pet chimpanzee, which was apparently the world's largest ceramic. It sold in 1991 for $5.6m, tripling Koons's previous sale record. This technique for enlarging mundane objects has also emerged in aspects of Hirst's work, including Hymn, an 18ft version of a 14-inch anatomical toy.
Cheyenne Westphal, the chair of contemporary art of Sotheby's in Europe, said it was clear that Hirst was an admirer of Koons' work. In an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, which showcased highlights from Hirst's own art collection, there were several pieces by Koons. "If you look at Koons' early work, such as his Hoovers and tanks, there is a direct correlation between this and Damien Hirst's work with formaldehyde. There's a very strong affinity between the two artists," she said.
In an era when artists were not regarded as "stars", Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant and placing advertisements in international art magazines featuring photographs of himself surrounded by the trappings of success.
During personal appearances and interviews, Koons began referring to himself in the third person. His personal life continued to create controversy when he married the Hungarian-born porn star Ilona Staller and worked on Made in Heaven, a series of paintings, photographs and sculptures that portrayed the couple in explicit sexual positions.
His work has been bought by galleries and collectors around the world as well as Hollywood celebrities. His sculpture of a West Highland terrier is displayed outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and other works have been bought by the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
At the same sale, Francis Bacon's painting Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, which he completed at the Royal College of Art in London in 1969, sold for £22.1m, more than £5m higher than its estimate, and his Self Portrait, painted when he was 60, sold for a £16m, more than double its estimated value. The total value of the sale was £152m.

source: Independent Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent

worth every penny

Just in time for Halloween - the Jack O' Lantern version of conceptual artist Damon Hirst's "For the Love of God"(click here for info). This small craft pumpkin was covered with silver spraypaint, then encrusted by hand with roughly $40 worth of fine rhinestones. The insurance needed to cover this thing will be phenomenonal. Thanks to
http://death-worm.livejournal.com/ for producing this artwork and for the links that followed:

Damien Hirst has been accused of copying yet another artist’s ideas.
Three weeks after the artist unveiled his diamond-encrusted skull with a price of £50 million, another artist, John LeKay, has told The Times that he has been producing similar jewel-encrusted skulls since 1993 (see image 2, left). He also believes that it is not the only one of his ideas that Hirst has used in some way.
LeKay, who claims to have been a friend of Hirst’s between 1992 and 1994, and who shared a mixed show with him in New York in 1994, said of the diamond skull: “When I heard he was doing it, I felt like I was being punched in the gut. When I saw the image online, I felt that a part of me was in the piece. I was a bit shocked.”
LeKay, a 46-year-old Londoner who lives in New York, created 25 of the skulls in 1993. Inspired by Mayan skulls, he used crystal to make his skull glisten. “When the light hits it, it looks as if it is covered in diamonds,” he said.
Over the years, he has explored the idea repeatedly, covering skulls made of soap and wax with artificial diamonds and Swarovski crystals.
He said: “I would like Damien to acknowledge that ‘John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot’. Damien’s very insecure about his originality. He used to say, ‘You’re a better artist than me’.
“He can be affectionate and is fun to be around, but he struggles to come up with ideas. It takes years of work to develop something. My stuff with crystals took a lot of research. You don’t just get there. He’s impatient. He’s a lazy artist.”
While Hirst is still looking for a buyer with £50 million to spare, LeKay’s skulls have sold for less than $2,500 (£1.200).
Last week Hirst’s Lullaby Spring – a medicine chest that would be mistaken for just that if placed anywhere other than an auction house or art gallery – changed hands for £9.6 million at Sotheby’s, making him the world’s most expensive living artist.
Hirst made his name by pickling a shark, then won the Turner Prize in 1995 with an exhibition that included Mother and Child, Divided – the severed halves of a cow and calf preserved in formaldehyde. LeKay claims that Hirst took such ideas from science education products sold by Carolina Biological Supply Company.
“I gave Damien a marked-up duplicate copy of the catalogue,” he said. “You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece. I gave him the catalogue to help him find butterflies.”
The similarity between Hirst’s diamond skull, For the Love of God, and skull-themed jewellery with Swarovski crystals produced by Butler and Wilson was reported earlier this month, but Hirst is no stranger to plagiarism claims.
Last year Robert Dixon, a graphics artist, said that Hirst’s print Valium bore unmistakable similarities to one of his circular designs on page 74 of The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry, published in 1991.
He claimed that when he initially contacted Hirst in 2003 he was taken aback by the e-mail response from the artist’s manager. Apparently unaware of Mr Dixon’s involvement with it, the manager said that Hirst had drawn inspiration from a book given to him by a friend – The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry.
Mr Dixon told The Times: “So Hirst’s manager wrote back to say the drawing was ‘nothing to do with you’, not realising that it was.”
Neither Hirst’s office, Science, nor his dealer, the White Cube, wished to comment yesterday.
Inspired
— Norman Emms, who designed a £14.99 plastic anatomical toy that was reproduced as a £1 million, 20ft bronze torso by Hirst, later received a “goodwill payment” from the artist
— The Stuckists, a group campaigning for traditional artistry, displayed a shark that hung in a London shop window two years before Hirst’s work was first shown
— The actor Keith Allen said that the theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn paid £27,000 for a Hirst painting that had been done by Hirst’s two-year-old son and Allen’s ten-year-old son
Source: Times database

Finding it incredibly difficult to use the word artist in my comment. I may be mistaken but my understanding is that Hirst rarely actually lays a hand on any of his supposed works of art. Where is the massive regognition of the technicians and professionals employed in creating a "Hirst".( and whats their cut of the £50 million) That is unless of course Damien Hirst himself sat for hour upon hour painstakingly positioning each stone onto the skull.
D B Hepburn, Aberdeen, Scotland

Yeah, but - it's not a very good idea in the first place is it? How long did it take you to think it up? The comedy value of this scandal is that in a few years time a Damien Hirst work will be worth its true value: zero.
Jack Bloxam, Edinburgh,

And here's one I made earlier. Where is the art world moving too when the use of materials that are already in existence can be valued at 50K. Both the skull and the diamonds were not created by the artist. The concept and fixing of the two materials I assume are. Now where did I leave that plastic gardening can perhaps if I stick some silk flowers on it, may be the white cube will interested in it.