It's funny how you learn something, and for one reason or another, promptly forget it. I remember reading a book called Shark Infested Waters by Sarah Kent. This was back in the 1990s, but already the British modern art movement had a history, a back catalogue: its winners and its losers. What I remember is, looking through this book and noticing how many of the artists in the Saatchi collection had already been put aside by fashion. The phenomenon that is contemporary art is so often defined by pure instantaneity: at any given moment it apparently has a shape, in time and space – a history – but that history seems disposable, and will change shape tomorrow.
What I realised was that celebrity culture builds a fiction on top of a set of facts that actually point to a totally different conclusion. What catches the eye in today's art is rarely the artist. British art in our time hasn't produced many enigmatic personalities (where is our Warhol?). It's actually striking works of art, not artists, that made British art stand out 20 years ago and gave it the fame it still enjoys. The history of art in the late 1980s and early 90s was not the story of amazing people, but of a tank of oil, a shark in a vitrine, a concrete house.
The images hold you; the ongoing lives of the artists rarely do. And yet, the entire system of art today is geared towards the idea of the individual creative genius. Never has the myth of the artist been more powerful.
I immediately forgot this fact, because it's inconvenient. It's so easy, for critics and everyone else, to name names. But it's the works we should talk about. That shark at the Saatchi Gallery was amazing. I wonder what happened to old what's-his-name.
