Does it mean something? Does it mean nothing? Hard to say with a show such as this one. The Guardian
Things to complain about: Section 1/General. The British Art Show 1990 did us all a service by demonstrating conclusively that major art reviewers in British newspapers are without exception reactionary, ill-informed, sloppy and uncreative. Some reviewers dismissed the entire event without mentioning the name of a single artist. It should be stated publicly that serious contemporary artists are not being served by Marina Vaizey, John Russell Taylor, Tim Hilton, Brian Sewell, Andrew Graham Dixon, who know and care as little about contemporary British art as young artists do about them. It is a dull job churning out newspaper copy but they choose to do it. At this point none of the above is concealing his or her boredom. As we know boredom slides imperceptibly into cynicism, and cynicism and art don’t mix. Better no reviews at all than the maunderings of bitter, ignorant hacks. Things to complain about: Section 2/Specific The wave of blandness that inevitably accompanies large exhibitions. Their committee atmosphere. Their titles which are not titles. Their catalogue essays which work so hard not to make a statement. (In this case the non-statement is that no movements are prevalent in Britain today, and how studiously unthematic the selection was meant to be, a position completely undermined by the author of the giveaway handbook, who, unknown to the selectors, proceeded to group everything under large general headings to ‘explain’ it). The fact that Arts Council money spent making elegant, well-designed catalogues does not include editing. Footnotes are not regularized, names of galleries appear with more than one spelling, T.S. Eliot’s rather famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is mis-titled. Thomas Kuhn’s surname is easily fudged, perhaps. But Breughal’s ought not to be. All the selectors think that the plural of ‘medium’ (painting, sculpture, film…) is ‘mediums’. Wrong. ‘Mediums’ are people in touch with the dead.
One complaint needs a paragraph all to itself. At least three generations of Goldsmiths graduates were shown in the exhibition: Lisa Milroy and Julian Opie, Grenville Davey and a slew of recent graduates including Ian Davenport and Jyll Bradley. One of the selectors teaches at Goldsmiths and the selectors themselves were chosen by Goldsmiths guru Michael Craig-Martin. A quarter of the chosen artists had something to do with Goldsmiths. This is not the complaint. The complaint is why the selectors won’t come clean and announce this tendency as the important matter they obviously decided that it was. Not doing so leaves them open to accusations of bias, at most, or at least a serious case of milroyopia.
Things to complain about in future: The Triumph of The British Art Show is that it has succeeded in demonstrating two points. The first is the total aridity of art about art theory, which ahs reached a desert and pitched its tents. (How long it takes a position as a pose, how long a pose can be held, has become the only issue in work like Caroline Russell’s or Gary Hume’s, masochistic in their willful limitations). The second triumph is that it has show what we all knew before: that ‘British’ means not only white, but also black, yellow and brown and that ‘Britain’ means not only London. For the first time, perhaps, the work on show is powerful and sensitive enough to drive the point home for good. Shaffique Uddin, Vong Phaopahnit, Sonia Boyce and in particular Mona Hatoum testified to the loneliness, anger and separation of outsiders in Britain. One less point to complain about in future.