No sooner had the block-busting Sensation retrospective closed, after the manic media circus of orchestrated controversy, than the London artworld began asking itself, in anxious tones, 'what now?' Sensation had, it seemed, finally closed the chapter on a period of activity which stretched back a decade to Damien Hirst's seminal exhibition Freeze, in which time the 'young' British artists represented in Sensation had gained international reputations and, with the passing years, steadily lost their claim to eternal youth. What had started in a warehouse in the docklands, had finally come home to the Royal Academy.
The end of Sensation highlighted what the first decade of the new British art had been about; shock tactics, willful self-promotion, tongue-in-cheek nihilism and a knowingly philistine attack on the ivory-tower seriousness and elitism of preceding contemporary art. But as the outrage surrounding the inclusion of Marcus Harvey's Myra showed, these strategies were becoming tired and over-used; the public sphere, previously indulgent, but quickly jaded by the antics of the 'rebels', proved intolerant when artists dared to step beyond the pale of contemporary sensibilities. With contemporary art firmly fixed in the public consciousness of 'Cool Britannia', there was less of an appetite for behaving badly to gain the mainstream's attention. Now that the Sensation generation of 'yBAs' were thoroughly established in the market and in the public collections, and with the general public familiarised with the phenomenon, the way was open for a new generation to take on the mantle of the up-and-coming.
The question was, what direction British art might take given its new-found place in the flourishing twenty-something culture of new Britain. The Sensation generation had grown up during the embittered latter decade of the Conservative government, a period marked by the defensive isolation of the art funding/educational establishment confronted by what it saw as a philistine and managerial government, and a fragmented and stagnant private market. Faced with such an impasse, those artists pragmatically sought to redefine the activity of art-making. Thus, to counter the perception of elitism and the reality of isolation from mainstream culture, they actively courted the media as a potent site of self-promotion; at the same time, their art reflected their disenchantment with what they saw as the over-theorised and over-politicised orthodoxies of their predecessors, and consequently their work often satirized the rigidity of theory bound art, or appropriated material from everyday culture as a way of escaping the 'high art' ghetto.
But to understand the success of the Sensation generation, it's useful to note certain trends at work outside of their youthful ambition and precocious talent. Without doubt, the fragile situation of the contemporary art establishment in the eighties in both the state-funded and commercial sectors made the arrival of these artists a more significant event. The state-funded sector saw in the new art an attention-grabbing accessibility that could help to re-establish the relevance of modern art to a wider audience, and so fend off the bums-on-seats demands of their conservative critics. And within London's commercial market, certain younger, less established dealers saw the advantages of promoting the new wave of undiscovered, and unrepresented artists. Underpinning these activities was the fact that London, having suffered two decades of decline, began to flourish again. 1983 marked the first upturn in London's population for three decades, a trend which has continued since. A significant part of this upturn, especially in the late 80s and early 90s, was due to the number of twenty and thirty-somethings moving into London (for a recent breakdown of these trends see Office for National Statistics: Focus on London 98). A younger, growing population, meant that not only was there a new generation of artists but, critically, there was a new audience to go with it.
These, in brief, were some of the influences that bore as much on the makers of the New British Art, as on those who became its audience. As the 90s have progressed, these trends have become increasingly established; contemporary art in London is now an integral part of a burgeoning metropolitan youth culture which provides it with an enthusiastic and expanded audience. What one critic described as the 'adultescent', that growing army of young adults who refuse to 'settle down' and would rather party well into middle age, form the bedrock of this constituency, and it is to this constituency that the media have increasingly turned their attention. The Sensation generation's use of the media to make their presence known has become an indispensable mechanism in the way in which contemporary art communicates with its audience. As the Creative Britain bandwagon has demonstrated, the rise of this new audience has impacted all areas of cultural activity, most markedly the fashion and music industries. The significance of this new audience has not been lost on the public relations consultants either. With big business eager to appear relevant, and cutting-edge, it is now possible to view new art sponsored by everyone from Habitat to Natwest, and although the publicly funded art sector still complains of underfunding, this is no longer the politically loaded issue it was under the Tories, now that Tony Blair wants to hang out with the stars of 'Cool Britannia'. But if this is the context the London artworld finds itself in at present, what implications might this have, if any, for the qualities of the art which is emerging, now that the Sensation generation is safely in the museum? In retrospect, it is evident that the body of work they produced was intimately linked with the moment they inhabited; their work expressed their frustration at the self-inflicted isolation and self-regard of previous avant-garde art, and their desire to make an art which was relevant to that experience of marginalisation. Now that Britart has everyone's attention, what does it have to say? It is little surprise that the first high-profile contribution to the 'what now?' debate should come from Charles Saatchi himself. After all, it was his patronage which first brought many of the Sensation artists to a wider public, through the Saatchi Gallery's landmark 'Young British Artists' shows in the early 90s; it is also from his collection that the entirety of Sensation was drawn. By staging Sensation, Saatchi set the seal on the market value of his investment, and indivisibly associated his name with the first stars of the New British Art. But rather than become, like Sensation, a part of recent art history, Saatchi has started to look for the 'next big thing'.
The Saatchi Gallery's new book, entitled The New Neurotic Realism, is a survey of work by young, rarely exhibited London-based artists, acquired over the past five years. The contrast with the work of the Sensation generation could not be more pronounced; In his introduction, i-D writer Dick Price slickly explains the motivations of these hopeful new contenders:

'...The art of the last two or three years poses a different look and preoccupation to the concerns of artists at the beginning of the decade. London in the early 90s championed youthful success; what started as 'alternative' quickly became establishment. But a group of artists working in the slipstream became excited by the media attention and wanted a 'piece of the action'. Inevitably the yBA cult of personality became tired. New artists and curators began looking elsewhere. Artists wanted to make art without anyone peering over their shoulders. They became enthusiastic about making again. Art started to look like it was having more fun while artists remained serious in how they reflected their concerns. These new artists started putting themselves into the picture through low-key, improvised shows at artist-run spaces. Cynicism was finally passˇ and the art star a bore."

Whether or not you accept Price's breathless adulation of the new kids on the block, it is clear that a distinct shift has taken place. For whatever he may say about these artists wanting to make art 'without anyone peering over their shoulders' their work confidently expects to be appreciated by their peers. Because they have nothing to prove, these artists can comfortably dispense with the grandiose and provocative cynicism of the earlier 'art star'. These 'neurotic realists' recognise that they, and their audience, are an integral part of the metropolitan 'adultescent' culture. Rather than flamboyant gestures of mock-nihilism or artworld in-jokes, the artists of The New Neurotic Realism are at home indulging their sentimental nostalgia for the pop culture of their collective childhood memories. Where the work of their predecessors was executed with technical precision and an attention to maximum impact, their own work is deliberately amateur and playfully extravagant, and although this new amateurism is not the only idea on offer, this tendency is the most pervasive and, I would argue, the most significant.
The theme of amateurism has been gradually gaining momentum on the London art scene for three or four years. Often referred to as 'Slacker' or 'bedroom' art, it was initially perceived as a reaction to the slick, high-finish professionalism that was evident in much of the work of the Sensation artists. To the more radically-minded, the possibility of making things badly, even cack-handedly was seen as a way of snubbing the art market's hunger for the elitist luxury object, the logic being that if you made something badly enough, you could not run the risk of being assimilated by the art-market, and so maintain a degree of artistic autonomy and integrity. At another level, the advocates of amateurism more potently argued that it freed the artist from the alienating demands of technical 'competence'. By using amateurish techniques, the artist maintained a kind of non-specialist accessibility. All forms of amateur art were appropriated; the less it smacked of professional art the better, whether it was children's cartoons, needlepoint, or the biro-fantasies of the teenager's sketch book. By adopting the formulas of the amateur, recent art deliberately rejects the notion that art is in any way intrinsically 'special', or 'better' than the authentic expression of the untrained non-specialist.
Of course there is nothing intrinsically good about technical competence; art history drowns in work which although 'competent' has no merit whatsoever. But the assumption of amateurist art that the slightest attempt at self-expression, however disorganised, is sufficient to communicate the 'authenticity' of the artist's intent, demeans the capacity of art to transcend the limits of its audience's experience, whilst simultaneously exempting the artist from being answerable to the awkward question of whether the work fails or succeeds. By aligning itself with the notional 'non-artist', amateurist art refuses to acknowledge the artist's engagement with anyone but himself, whilst flattering the audience with the easy recognition that the artist's activity is no more demanding than its own.
But amateurism's real lack of ambition isn't simply its rejection of the limited notion of technical specialism. Rather, the adoption of the amateur idiom is a declaration that the artist cannot offer a vision of experience which is any more valid or insightful than anyone else. In much the same way as politicians, lacking any credibility with the public, prefer to endlessly seek out the public's opinion rather than set the agenda themselves, so recent artists content themselves with insisting that they are no different, and no more extraordinary than the rest of us. The trivialisation of the political sphere which accompanied the demise of the grand narratives of both left and right, finds its artistic counterpart in the trivialisation of art; having long ago rejected the grandiose (and untenable) transformative claims of the modernist project, contemporary art finds itself left with a much reduced sense of what it can achieve. As part of that process of minimisation, amateurist art, represents a further retreat from the risk of failure; By lowering the stakes, it becomes impossible to lose.
The sad irony of this is that far from being 'alternative', the attitude of the self-satisfied loser who does not have to answer to anyone for what he does, is now entirely embedded in mainstream attitudes, especially those of the young. Compared to the complacency of many of the artists of The New Neurotic Realism, the fuck-you attitude and ambition of the Sensation generation is almost appealing. Once again, Charles Saatchi has proved himself to be an excellent barometer of contemporary sensibilities- the paradox is that, at a time when the audience for contemporary art has never been greater, new artists should have so little to say.

© JJ Charlesworth 1998

top