The scandal as a brush: When the young british artists redrew art
Imagine London in 1997. The city is finally breathing after eighteen years of Thatcherism, and something new, electric, is in the air. This is the era of the Spice Girls singing Wannabe, of Oasis and Blur tearing each other apart in the papers, of art galleries suddenly opening their doors to names unknown just five years earlier. And then there’s that exhibition at the Royal Academy, Sensation, which will change everything. Thousands of visitors queue in the rain, some to admire, others to protest, and many simply to see what all the fuss is about. Inside, one work draws every eye: an unmade bed, surrounded by used condoms, empty vodka bottles, and stained underwear. My Bed, by Tracey Emin. A few rooms away, a shark suspended in formaldehyde, its jaws wide open as if screaming in silence. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, by Damien Hirst.
By Artedusa
••13 min readThese two works, despite themselves, became icons. Together, they embody the spirit of the Young British Artists. A movement that wasn’t really one—no manifesto, no rules, just a group of young people who had emerged from Goldsmiths, a London art school, determined to shake everything up. Their weapon? Provocation. Their playground? The tabloid press, the trendy galleries, and above all, the idea that art could be raw, personal, and deeply commercial. Twenty-five years later, their legacy still divides. Some see a revolution; others, a sham. One thing is certain: without them, contemporary art would not be what it is today.
01England in the 1990s: fertile ground for rebellion
To understand the YBAs, you first have to return to London in the 1980s and 1990s, a city both exhausted and seething. Margaret Thatcher had been in power since 1979, and her legacy was everywhere: the docks of East London, once the industrial lungs of the country, were in ruins. Mines closed, factories too, and an entire generation found itself adrift. Yet in this desolate landscape, something was taking root. Rents were low, squats plentiful, and a creative youth, often from working-class backgrounds, seized the abandoned spaces. It was in this context that Damien Hirst, then a student at Goldsmiths, organised an exhibition in a disused Docklands warehouse in 1988. Freeze, as it was called, brought together around fifteen young artists, several of whom would become key figures in the movement: Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Michael Landy.
What struck people about Freeze wasn’t just the youth of the participants—most were barely twenty—but their audacity. No polished oil paintings, no marble sculptures. Instead, installations made from cheap materials, repurposed ready-mades, works that spoke of sex, death, despair, but also dark humour. Hirst was already showing his Spot Paintings, canvases covered in coloured circles inspired by medicine bottles. At the time, no one knew these dots would become his signature, endlessly reproduced by assistants in his factory-studio.
But the real turning point came in 1992, when Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate turned collector, bought A Thousand Years, a Hirst installation featuring a decomposing cow’s head teeming with flies. Saatchi, who had made his fortune with shock campaigns for the Conservative Party, immediately recognised the potential of these young artists. He exhibited them in his Boundary Road gallery and, above all, gave them unprecedented media exposure. The tabloids seized on the phenomenon. The Sun ran the headline: "Is this art or is it sick?" in reference to a Marcus Harvey work depicting the face of child killer Myra Hindley, composed of children’s handprints in paint. The YBAs, despite themselves, became the enfant terribles of an England seeking reinvention.
02Damien Hirst: the artist who put death on display
If the YBAs had a leader, it was Damien Hirst. Born in 1965 in Bristol, he grew up in a modest household—his father was a mechanic, his mother worked in administration. As a teenager, he was fascinated by death: he collected dead animals, worked as a gravedigger, and even briefly in a morgue. At Goldsmiths, he befriended other students who would form the core of the YBAs, like Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. But it was Hirst who first understood that art could be both an aesthetic experience and a media spectacle.
His most famous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, sums up his approach. A four-metre tiger shark swimming in a formaldehyde-filled tank, its jaws wide open as if it had just bitten into the void. The work, created in 1991, was commissioned by Charles Saatchi. Hirst didn’t catch the shark himself—he bought it from an Australian fisherman for £6,000. What mattered wasn’t the object itself, but the idea: to show death, to make it tangible, almost beautiful. "People are afraid of sharks, but they’re even more afraid of death," he explained. The formaldehyde, usually used to preserve specimens in natural history museums, became an artistic medium here. The work played with the boundaries between science and art, between beauty and horror.
Yet behind this conceptual facade lay a more prosaic reality: the original shark, poorly preserved, began to rot as early as 1993. Hirst had to replace it in 2006, still with Saatchi’s money. This anecdote speaks volumes about his method: the artwork wasn’t a sacred object, but a product, sometimes ephemeral, often reproducible. His Spot Paintings—canvases covered in coloured circles arranged in a grid—are the perfect example. Hirst produced thousands of them, often painted by assistants. "I haven’t touched a brush in years," he admitted. To his detractors, this proved he was nothing more than a cynical businessman. To his defenders, it was a way of pushing Duchamp’s ready-made to its logical extreme: if a bicycle wheel could be art, why not a canvas painted by someone else?
His commercial peak came in 2007 with For the Love of God, a human skull in platinum encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, including a 52-carat pink diamond on the forehead. The work, valued at £50 million, was bought by a consortium that included Hirst himself. The skull, purchased from a London shop, had belonged to an 18th-century European. "My mother said, ‘For God’s sake, Damien, what are you doing?’" he recounted. The title was a nod to her reaction. With this work, Hirst pushed provocation to its limit: an object of extreme luxury that spoke of death, vanity, and the absurdity of the art market. "It’s like putting a price on God’s head," wrote one critic.
03Tracey Emin: art as public confession
If Hirst was the YBAs’ strategist, Tracey Emin was their tormented soul. Born in 1963 in Croydon to a Turkish Cypriot father and an English mother, she grew up in Margate, a faded seaside resort. Her childhood was marked by poverty, sexual abuse, and a chaotic adolescence—she ran away at thirteen, became an alcoholic, got pregnant at eighteen, and had an abortion. "I’ve spent my life trying to rebuild myself," she said. It was this reconstruction that she staged in her art, with an honesty that shocked as much as it fascinated.
Her most famous work, My Bed (1998), was born from depression. After a breakup, Emin stayed in bed for four days, drunk, in tears, unable to get up. When she finally emerged from her stupor, she looked at her bed—the stained sheets, empty vodka bottles, used condoms, soiled underwear, negative pregnancy tests—and decided to exhibit it as it was. "I wanted to show the state I was in. It wasn’t a performance; it was my life," she explained. When the work was shown at the Tate in 1999 as part of her Turner Prize nomination, the reactions were fierce. "Is this art or is it shit?" asked The Sun. Visitors tried to make the bed; others left fresh condoms on it. Emin watched the scene with a mix of amusement and sadness. "People are afraid of the truth. They prefer polite lies."
My Bed wasn’t just a provocative work; it was a revolution in how the female body was represented. Unlike traditional nudes, idealised and passive, Emin’s bed was a self-portrait without a body—or rather, a body that was absent but whose traces were everywhere: in the stains, in the intimate objects, even in the smell of the work (some visitors reported detecting the scent of sweat and stale tobacco). "It’s a work about shame, but also about resilience," wrote art critic Laura Cumming. "Emin doesn’t just expose her private life; she turns it into a manifesto."
Her other major work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), was a tent appliquéd with names—102 in total, of everyone she had shared a bed with, whether lovers, friends, or even her grandmother. "I wanted to show that sleep is intimate. You don’t sleep with just anyone," she said. The tent, first exhibited in 1997 at the Royal Academy, became a symbol of confessional art. Yet in 2004, it was destroyed in a fire at a Momart warehouse storing Saatchi’s collection. Emin refused to recreate it. "Some things can’t be replaced," she said simply.
04Provocation as strategy (and as trap)
The YBAs understood one essential thing: in a world saturated with images, the only way to get noticed is to shock. But provocation, while a powerful weapon, can also become a trap. "We were often accused of making art for the tabloids," admitted Sarah Lucas. "But that’s exactly the genius of it: we used the media to spread our ideas."
Take Myra (1995) by Marcus Harvey. The work depicted the face of Myra Hindley, the child killer, composed of children’s handprints in paint. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1997, angry visitors threw ink and eggs at the canvas. Police had to intervene. Yet the work showed nothing more than what newspapers had been publishing for years. "It’s the hypocrisy that shocks, not the image," analysed critic Julian Stallabrass. "People accept seeing Myra Hindley in the papers, but not in an art gallery. As if art had to be pure, innocent, when the world isn’t."
This ambiguity was at the heart of the YBAs’ approach. Their works played with the boundaries between art and life, the sacred and the profane. Hirst displayed dead animals, but in pristine, almost clinical vitrines. Emin exhibited her bed, but turned it into a museum object. "We took what was most vulgar, most intimate, and made it art," Hirst summed up. "That’s the real provocation."
Yet this strategy had a downside. By constantly shocking, the YBAs eventually wore people out. In the 2000s, their influence waned. Hirst turned to more commercial projects, like his Diamond Skull or collaborations with luxury brands. Emin became an institutional figure—professor at the Royal Academy, commissioned for public works. "We were accused of selling out," she said. "But art has always been a business. The only difference is that we admitted it."
05The YBAs’ legacy: what remains when the provocation fades
Twenty-five years after Sensation, what is left of the Young British Artists? Their influence is everywhere, even if it’s not always visible. They brought contemporary art into the age of spectacle, turning galleries into spaces for public debate. They proved that a work could be both conceptual and popular, provocative and commercial. And above all, they paved the way for a new generation of artists who, like them, use their lives as raw material.
Take Banksy. His street art, both political and humorous, owes much to the YBA spirit. Like them, he plays with the media, stages stunts, and blurs the lines between art and activism. Then there are the confessional artists like Nan Goldin or Sophie Calle, who pushed the idea of autobiographical art even further. "Without Tracey Emin, I would never have dared to expose my life the way I do," confided a young British artist.
Yet their most lasting legacy may lie elsewhere: in how they changed our relationship with art. Before the YBAs, an exhibition was a cultural event reserved for an elite. After them, it became a social phenomenon, something discussed in newspapers, on TV, at dinner parties. "They made art a topic of conversation, and that may be their greatest achievement," said critic Jonathan Jones.
One question remains: will their art outlive its era? Will Hirst’s sharks eventually rot, despite the formaldehyde? Will Emin’s beds lose their emotional charge once their creators are no longer around to talk about them? Perhaps. But one thing is certain: as long as there are artists to challenge conventions, the spirit of the YBAs will live on. "Art is like life," Hirst once said. "It has to disturb, or what’s the point?"
06Epilogue: when art becomes a family affair
There’s one last story, less known, that sums up the YBAs’ spirit. In 2018, Tracey Emin installed a monumental work at St Pancras station in London. I Want My Time With You is a phrase in pink neon, suspended above travellers. "I wanted people to feel less alone while waiting for their train," she explained. The work, commissioned by the station’s management company, was a success. Passengers stopped, took photos, smiled.
A few months later, Damien Hirst unveiled his own public work: The Virgin Mother, a monumental sculpture of a pregnant woman with her belly open to reveal the foetus inside. The piece, installed outside a shopping centre in Ilfracombe, Devon, divided locals. Some found it beautiful; others, grotesque. "That’s so Hirst," commented a journalist. "Even when he tries to be serious, he can’t help but shock."
These two works, so different, show how the YBAs have evolved. Emin, once the bad girl of British art, has become an almost maternal figure, her words comforting hurried travellers. Hirst remains the provocateur, unable to resist one last shock, even in a provincial shopping centre.
And perhaps that’s the beauty of it: that these two, who began their careers exhibiting dead sharks and unmade beds, ended up offering the public works about love, time, and motherhood. As if, after all these years, they had finally found something stronger than provocation: emotion.