Meanwhile the 1990s and 2000s are undergoing a wider critical evaluation. Sarah Lucas’s retrospective ‘Happy Gas’ has just opened at Tate Britain (until 14 January). Tracey Emin recently opened her artist’s residency programme in Margate, created new bronze doors for the National Portrait Gallery this summer, and will have a major commercial exhibition with White Cube this year. They are both benefiting from the current demand for women artists.
Tracey Emin standing next to The Doors (2023) at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: Harry Weller
But it is artists of a similar age to the YBA group but who were not associated with them – including British film-makers Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah and Steve McQueen – who are currently some of the most admired on the international stage. The 55-year-old German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, meanwhile, who first moved to Bethnal Green in London in 1992, had a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, last year. It is currently showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, before it moves to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year.
‘The YBA story – which was a very Anglo-American model coming out of Pop art – preoccupied the media and the market,’ Staple says. ‘Part of my curatorial role at the Tate is to look back and recognise the many other artists working at the time, including Black British artists, who were not part of the dominant narrative.’
Frieze London, meanwhile, is a very different beast from its 2003 incarnation. Endeavor, a giant US entertainment company that owns World Wrestling Entertainment, Miss World and the sports management firm IMG, bought a 70 per cent stake in 2019. Frieze now embraces historic art at Frieze Masters, and runs fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul. In July it was announced that Frieze was also buying the Armory Show in New York and Expo Chicago. Inevitably, as the fair has grown, it has become more professional, more upmarket, more sleek and, some say, more corporate and dull.
Perhaps the most noticeable change since the 1990s has been in London’s commercial contemporary art scene. The tiny group of ’90s galleries – Lisson, Maureen Paley, Sadie Coles HQ, Karsten Schubert et al. – has now swollen to number about 300. The galleries are also much more international: White Cube, the gallery most associated with the YBAs, has just opened a new gallery in New York and its roster of artists comes from around the world.
In 2021 Sharp and Slotover recalled that in the 1990s ‘the [entire contemporary] London art world could fit in a single pub’ – indeed, after openings at galleries such as Anthony d’Offay’s in Mayfair, it often did. Had you said to one of the none-too-sober attendees that within a few years London would have a contemporary art scene as large and as rich as New York’s, you would have been greeted with a snort of derision – and an unprintable reply.
