High Art Lite

The controversial Sensation exhibition--which prompted irate New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to attempt to cut off city funding to the Brooklyn Museum--typifies a new wave of media-addled ""Young British Artists"" who buoyed up to the surface this decade. Oxford art historian Stallabrass attempts an unmasking of their work as ""high art lite,"" incisively arguing that most of it is neither formally innovative nor conceptually rich, and that many pieces owe their popularity and indeed their very existence to the ministrations of the art's major collector--British ad mogul Charles Saatchi. In a series of subtle, scholarly looks, Stallabrass (Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture) finds the work spiked with Dada, relentlessly up-to-date pop-cultural references and elements of minimalism and conceptual art, but nothing that reconceptualizes or surpasses the original uses of these modes by their (mostly American) innovators. He gives detailed but engaging analyses of attendance figures at the Saatchi collection-based Sensation, which began its world tour at the Royal Academy in London (where it caused similar controversy), and makes a strong case that the museum played into Saatchi's hands. (A museum's imprimatur greatly increases a collection's value.) With nearly 80 full-color reproductions of works by artists like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dino Chapman and Sam Taylor-Wood, the book neatly encapsulates the controversy surrounding their seemingly debased qualities, albeit from a British perspective. Stallabrass, as a veteran of British art journalism, writes compellingly and with a wide-ranging historical sense; readers will find such cogent contextualization essential to an often overheated debate. (Jan.)