YBA
In the summer of 1988, in an empty warehouse in the London Docklands, students from Goldsmiths put on an exhibition themselves. It was called the Freeze exhibition. Damien Hirst, still a student at the time, organized it, and painted the walls and rigged the lighting himself. Rather than wait to be called into a gallery, they made the place themselves. Within ten years of that, they had become British contemporary art itself. A word about the name. The phrase young British artists is said to have been used first by Michael Corris in Artforum in May 1992. As for the abbreviation YBA, the likeliest account is that the critic Simon Ford coined it in an essay for Art Monthly in 1996. It was a neutral label, grouping them by generation, by age, and by the school they came from. I have written across this map that the name of a style usually begins as an insult, but that is not what happened here. The other large presence is Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate. He became their biggest patron, bought the work in quantity, put it in front of the media, and showed it in his own gallery. The Sensation exhibition of 1997 was that collection shown at the Royal Academy of Arts. A portrait of a serial killer built out of children's handprints became the focus of protest, and the newspapers wrote about it day after day. The modern pattern in which the uproar grows larger than the work is plain to see here.