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Celebrity
If the prize-giving itself has been controversial that's nothing to what people have thought about some of the art. Some artists have become very famous on the back of the fact that lots of people have thought that their art was rubbish.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin (1999) is a case in point. In her Turner Prize show she exhibited My Bed, an average sort of bed, unmade, with dirty sheets and assorted human detritus (fags, condom, dirty knickers, vodka bottle) arrayed beside it. The whole thing felt sordid, as if you should avert your eyes. Except there it was, in the middle of the room, precisely because you were supposed to look at it.
Some people think there is something revelatory about that contradiction. Other people think it's just not art: that you shouldn't be able to put everyday objects in gallery space and go, 'Mmm, isn't that interesting?'
Emin didn't win the prize but everyone heard about her. You can see her bed in the new Saatchi Gallery in London and you can often see Emin in the society pages of glossy magazines, at parties with lots of other celebrities.
Damien Hirst
One popular take on contemporary art is that it can't be art if it's too easy. Like not even making the bed, for example. A lot of Damien Hirst's work doesn't look easy, but does it look like art? Quite a lot of it looks like taxidermy or pickling things.
Hirst (1992, 1995) is famous for his dead animals. In Mother and Child, Divided he transected a mother and her calf. Each section of pickled bovine stands alone in a glass case, clinically divided from its other half. An even greater gulf exists between mother and child.
Most people think this is quite clever and new, but not everyone agrees that it is art. Those that do might say the piece makes them consider how alienated we are from the visceral reality of our existence; or how fundamentally alone all creatures are: existing as they do, as unalterably separate biological entities; or any number of other things.
Not everyone got that much out of it though. One Evening Standard reader, writing to the paper in protest against Hirst's work, complained, 'However you view the exhibit, it increased the demand for dead animals by two, created unnecessary death and cheapened the life of a mother and child. Justice may yet be done should the artist be reincarnated as a dairy cow.'
YBAs
Despite his detractors, Damien Hirst has a particularly prominent spot in the recent history of contemporary British Art. In 1988, as a young graduate of Goldsmiths College, he curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own and of some of his contemporaries' work. Among these were Ian Davenport (1991), Anya Gallaccio (2003), Gary Hume (1996), Fiona Rae (1991) and Sarah Lucas (rumoured to have refused her Turner nomination). This, and a subsequent Hirst-curated exhibition called Medicine Man in 1990, launched what became known as the Young British Artists – the YBAs.
The YBAs were very exciting for contemporary British art, conveniently coinciding with a reinvigorated Turner Prize, the government's Cool Britannia feel-good spin, and much bolstered by Charles Saatchi forking out shockingly large amounts of money for some of the work.
According to critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings, they were 'really a movement of everything mixed up and everyone chopping and changing between different mediums and styles'.
Although many of the YBAs are still around, they're not as Y as they used to be. They're no longer grouped together as a sudden flush of new talent because they've diversified and grown up. As Nicholas Serota has rather deflatingly pointed out: they're all about 40 now.
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