Art terms on "Y"

Young British Artists (YBAs)

The Young British Artists (YBAs) is a label applied to an informal group of artists who began exhibiting together in the late 1980s and went on to define the face of British art in the 1990s. The starting point is generally considered to be the 1988 exhibition Freeze, organised by Damien Hirst, then a student at Goldsmiths College in London, in an empty dockland building. The circle of YBAs includes Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marc Quinn, Gary Hume, Chris Ofili and others. The artists were united not by a common style but by an openness to new materials and processes, a taste for sensational and often shocking tactics, and an entrepreneurial attitude to their careers. Iconic works include Hirst's shark in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Emin's tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With and her installation My Bed. The collector and advertising figure Charles Saatchi played a key role in their rise, and his 1997 exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy caused a great stir. The YBAs turned London into one of the world's centres of contemporary art and radically changed perceptions of the art market and of publicity in art.