High Art Lite British Art in the 1990s

High Art Lite takes a cool and critical look at a much-hyped subject-British art of the 1990s. With artists like Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Dake & Dinos Chapman, and Tracey Emin acquiring a media profile similar to pop stars, British art has reinvented itself and successfully courted a wider popularity than it has ever enjoyed before. On the face of it, much of their art has looked like simple bad behavior-using chopped up animals, pornography and sexually explicit dolls as its material, or building up the features of a child murderer using tiny hand-prints. Yet their art has been both accessible and sophisticated, appealing to the mass media and to the elite art world alike. But has it done so at the price of dumbing art down, reducing it to the level of any other consumer enterprise, and losing what is distinctive about it? Other than as publicity-fodder, how seriously does it take the new audience that it has so effectively courted? In this accessible and generously illustrated book, Julian Stallabrass provides a sustained analysis of the British art scene, exploring the reasons for its popularity and examining in detail the work of the leading figures.