Image: What are we to make of Sensation, 25 years on?
Ron Mueck, Dead Dad , 1996-1997. © the artist
Featured in The Telegraph

What are we to make of Sensation, 25 years on?

2022年9月18日

Historians of modern art tend to get a little giddy about certain incendiary exhibitions – such as the first Impressionist show of 1874 – that changed the course of their subject. For followers of British art of a certain vintage, Sensation, which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts 25 years ago today, belongs to this notorious lineage. 

Featuring 42 of the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) collected by the advertising executive Charles Saatchi, it certainly – as its title promised – provoked an intense reaction. Here were 110 controversial artworks by a new generation of raucous, on-the-make self-starters, who, thanks to prolific coverage in the tabloids, were already in the public eye. Damien Hirst’s tiger shark suspended in a tank of turquoise formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s appliquéd tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995), were both on display. So was Sarah Lucas’s Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992), arranged on a table like a crude pictogram of the female form: a grungy, throwaway gesture, deliberately debasing Western art’s grand tradition of the nude into a sort of last-orders odalisque. 

And they weren’t even the most “shocking”. Remember Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad (1996-97), a terrifyingly realistic silicone sculpture of a naked paternal corpse? Or Jake and Dinos Chapman’s mutant mannequins, with penises for noses and anuses instead of mouths? Perhaps you’d rather not.

Atmospheric image Atmospheric image
Atmospheric image Atmospheric image
Atmospheric image Atmospheric image