HIGH ART LITE

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. Stallabrass (Art/Oxford Univ.; Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, not reviewed, etc.) considers how, under —transgressive— veneers, this movement represents a furtherance of Warhol’s beliefs in the primacy of commerce and the creator’s carefully tended persona. Artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili have presented provocative and sometimes moving work whose larger effect is inevitably subordinated to whatever catchall —controversial— components have been integrated (e.g., animal decay, promiscuity, elephant dung). Dismissing the theory driving this art as —facile postmodernism,— Stallabrass reveals the concealed privilege and elite education of the artists involved. He finds the external responses to the —movement— reflected in both the crude, glossy tactics and the subjects of the young artists—who see this ultraconceptual art as highly marketable even when it requires little technical prowess—and the egregiously inflationary effect of Charles Saatchi, the movement’s primary purchaser. The ’scene’s— media-savvy harnessing of promotion, positive or otherwise, becomes an artistic component incorporating even the movement’s disparagers, from conservative art commentator Brian Sewell to New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor whose shameless grandstanding against the Brooklyn Art Museum’s —Sensation— exhibit could have been choreographed by Saatchi’s admen. Stallabrass, fortunately, is no Giuliani: His critique is sensitive in both its artistic interpretation and its exposure of the political calculation of the artists— endeavors. Although Stallabrass appreciates the light their work intermittently throws on modern beliefs about art and culture, he cannot forgive them their aggressive solipsism or their childlike insistence that raunchy cleverness merits reward all on its own. Nimbly written and bolstered by a constellation of critical and cultural referents: a balanced, engrossing, historically framed examination of this latest avant-garde, so startling yet so oddly familiar. (50 color and b&w illustrations)