Pornography, Animal Remains and Mass Murderers... The Young British Artist’s impact on ‘shock art’

In September 1997, the Young British Artists (YBAs) staged what would become one of the most controversial exhibitions in modern history. Brought together by Charles Saatchi’s collection, Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts became exactly that – a sensation. When the exhibition travelled to the Brooklyn Museum three years later, the deputy mayor, Joseph J. Lhota, threatened to withdraw the museum’s funding. The New York Daily News headline blared: “B’KLYN GALLERY OF HORROR. GRUESOME MUSEUM SHOW STIRS CONTROVERSY.” Thirty years on, what can be said of the YBAs and our capacity to be shocked by contemporary art?

Damian Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Hirst’s 1988 exhibition Freeze, organised with fellow Goldsmiths College of Art students in a disused Docklands warehouse, marked the movement’s informal beginning. The show was bold, unorthodox, and defiantly anti-establishment, qualities that caught the attention of collector Charles Saatchi. He eagerly seized upon their raw energy, seeing in it something ground-breaking and distinctly British: a hunger for reinvention after years of cultural conservatism. This collaboration culminated in the Royal Academy’s now-infamous Sensation exhibition, which catapulted the YBAs to global prominence through Saatchi’s patronage. Featuring artists including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Saville, and Richard Patterson, the show became a flashpoint of debate. Each artist, in their own way, tested the limits of taste and tradition, and some provoked outrage from the British press. For Marcus Harvey, that outrage was part of the work itself. His 9-by-11-foot rendering of Myra Hindley’s mugshot, the woman who, in 1965, murdered five children, was composed using casts of children’s hands. Its controversy was its very success; the piece confronted the sensationalism of serial killers in the media, which had branded Hindley ‘the most evil woman in Britain’. The irony was clear: its critique of media sensationalism was precisely what drew even more of it.

Sensation quickly became the dominant cultural talking point across the British media. The

BBC Three programme Late Review invited critics including Tom Paulin to discuss it, he

dismissed the show as “stout, shallow, puerile flogging Marcel Duchamp’s dead horse.”

Indeed, influences from Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and other pioneers of conceptual art were

evident. All art follows from a historical canon, but the YBAs reinterpreted it in a way no one

had quite seen before. While in London, Harvey’s Myra drew the fiercest criticism; in New

York, it was Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary that caused uproar. For more puritanical

viewers, the cut-outs of angels made from porn magazines, combined with an African Virgin

Mary adorned with elephant dung, were enough to imperil the Brooklyn Museum’s entire

funding. Both Ofili’s and Harvey’s works were vandalised during the exhibition, a vivid

reflection of the YBAs’ polarising reception. The group thrived in this environment, where

provocation ensured visibility. Backed by Saatchi’s collecting power and the tabloids’

appetite for scandal, they became not just artists but cultural celebrities.

Although the transatlantic scandals involving Harvey and Ofili first captured the headlines, it was Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst who ultimately became the enduring faces of the so- called movement. Hirst’s shark preserved in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and his decaying cow’s head covered in flies, A Thousand Years, remain emblematic of the YBA era. Emin rivals this legacy with equal force. In a recent conversation about contemporary art, an older fellow passenger on a flight railed against her 1999 installation My Bed, arguing, as many critics once did, that it was simply “not art.” Yet three decades later, with retrospectives of Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain and Emin’s forthcoming show at Tate Modern, the public’s capacity for shock has greatly diminished. Today, an exhibition devoid of conceptual or installation-based work can seem, to some, almost overly conventional.

The allure of the YBAs lasted less than a decade, yet members Emin and Hirst have become regarded as the most commercially successful British artists of the twenty-first century. Their later work is more refined and introspective than confrontational, but this evolution underscores what the YBAs mastered from the outset: treating attention itself as a medium. Their art’s meaning was ephemeral, defined by its collective cultural perception. In that sense, their legacy lies not in provocation for its own sake but in exposing the mechanics of visibility; how art circulates, gains traction, and embeds itself within public consciousness. The success of the YBAs, and the Sensation exhibition at its height, stemmed from precisely that understanding: the artwork was inseparable from its moment in time, its power derived as much from context as from creation.