For several years now British art has been rising in status, with the epicentre of the new hysteria being firmly focused on London. However, the backlash is coming, and in many ways it is not a moment too soon. What will be interesting to see, though, is how the major figures of this movement, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas being just two, manage once the party is over.

The particular trend that has fuelled international interest in the work of the Young British Artists (Yba's) has been the emphasis placed on it's laissez faire transgression, and it's resulting hipness. It maybe true that all avant-garde art must transgress social mores in some way in order to push art forward, but in the case of the Yba's this "shock" was all the more powerful because that's all there was. Nothing stood behind the bum-showing, the two-fingers or the outrage: and that was the point. Like the punks before them, these people wanted to show themselves to be outside society, to be a product of all the useless aspects of the culture that had ultimately created them. It was adolescent rebellion made with grand gestures, it was money for old rope. Hirst gave us the shark's in formaldehyde and the cows cut in two wrapped in grand eloquent titles. We reeled with the sublimity of it all. Sarah Lucas nailed a kipper to a table and blew up tabloids for us to laugh at with a new post-PC ironic laugh. Most of all, we were shocked with their audacity, their courage.
This was young British artists speaking to the world.

And yet, the shock doesn't last. When the cows were cut in two again and again, the magic wore off. When cucumbers and melons were stuffed into mattresses, we couldn't keep laughing. The joke had wore thin; the world had moved on.

What has become telling, is that these works have all too soon become seen as being smug, and self congratulating; capital products produced for a moneyed culture that has now finally got the joke. It stands as one of history's small ironies that works that grew out of a reaction to the money-grabbing of the Thatcher years have so quickly become snacks for the uber-capitalist collectors of the nineties, have become the empty, cheque-book comments of generation that has grown up to fast. Or weren't they quite as radical as we once thought? Or were they the lucky ones, and were afforded the opportunity to have their cake and eat it?

But why are they seen, now, as failing? The most likely answer is the precise reason they were initially so successful: their work is essentially cold and soulless. The ironic comments on the individualistic eighties have been shown in the nineties as being uncommitted in cultural climate that very much cherishes the tenets of politicism and care. These artists works do not look at the political machinations of the society that has created them, but rather the obsessions of the individuals that have works of art. This self reflection might be construed as being a result of a clever addressing the role of the artist in the society that has created them, but on all evidence these artists practices are too simple, too vulgar for that. However, that is not to say that they have failed, but rather, that they need to acknowledge that the times have changed if they still want to uphold the beliefs of their generation. But, as always, fame has separated them from their roots, and they now speak only to their accountants.

The party was great while it lasted, and I'm glad everyone was invited, but it's time to go.

Time to move on.

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