Visual Arts: You can puff all you like Damien, but the wind's gone out of Britart Berlin art critic Nicola Kuhn on what's gone wrong

• Published in: The Guardian (London)
• Main Author: Kuhn, Nicola
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 16.03.1999
• Subjects: Visual artists; Young adults; UK; United Kingdom
• ISSN: 0261-3077

Even in Berlin, we try to do our best for the BBC. It is not every day they call us at Der Tagesspiegel, so I was eager to please when they rang to interview me about the opening of the Sensation exhibition in the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin's new museum of modern art. What did we think? Were Berliners outraged by the Myra Hindley portrait? Were we shocked and scandalised as London audiences supposedly were by Marc Quinn's blood and gore, and all those morphed little Chapman girls, the excited reporter asked. Er, no, not really. I felt a little sorry to say that there was no sensation about Sensation, no fuss whatsoever about the portrait of Myra Hindley, a child murderer hardly known outside Britain. If anything, the work of the Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection was more sad and serious than the irreverent, funny and dazzling array of delinquent talent that had been described to me by people who had seen the original show at the Royal Academy. Even then, I had heard, Sensation was seen as both the last gasp and zenith of the YBA movement. It all made me very curious. Usually nobody cares at home how American, French, Italian or whoever's art is appreciated abroad. What was so important about the YBAs that people bothered to worry how foreigners would perceive them? How had they done the impossible and made the public interested in conceptual art while at the same time sparking worldwide interest in young artists after the great collapse in confidence and prices at the end of the eighties? And why, after such an irresistible rise, was this movement now in `decay'? I decided to go to London myself to find out.