A scathing and incisive critique of the contemporary art world, in an updated new edition
Julian Stallabrass is Professor in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His books include High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, and Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. In 2008 he curated the Brighton Photo Biennial, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, nine contrasting exhibitions about war photography. He writes for the New Left Review, Artforum, Texte zur Kunste, Bazaar Art and the London Review of Books.
Julian Stallabrass, in his Verrine blast against Britart, combines
the early Berger's fierce critique of consumerist contamination
with the later Berger's sense of art's high purpose.
*London Review of Books*
I cannot help but endorse his analysis of the high art lite
tendency ... its abject willingness to be f**ked up by the cult of
celebrity; f**ked over by the 1990s boom in consumerism; f**ked
sideways by its adoption of the styles and modes of popular
culture; and f**ked to buggery by its co-option by a new Labourite
idiotology.
*Will Self*
A lacerating analysis of the reactionary tendencies of high art
lite itself.
*Financial Times*
This is a sharp and sensible book about something that seemed
unlikely to attract such treatment-the new, rude, jokey,
confrontational British Art of the 1990s.
*Evening Standard*
A full-throated attack on the 'new British art,' a movement
obsessed with commerce and cults of the personal, that manages to
be smarter and more far-reaching than its hyped-hopped-up subject
... Nimbly written and bolstered by a constellation of critical and
cultural referents: balanced, engrossing, historically framed
examination of this latest avant-garde, so startling yet so oddly
familiar.
*Kirkus Review*
He asks the questions that people would like addressed, and gives
the thoughtful and provocative answers. What is the real worth of
these artefacts?
*Independent*
Stallabrass has done us all a favour. He's taken on a dirty job and
we are all indebted to him ... his analysis is lucid and
penetrating. It's also quite funny ... something to be read
voluntarily with pleasure.
*Art and Language, everything magazine*
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