Author: Stallabrass, Julian
Title: High Art Lite
Description: London, Verso, (1999). orig.boards. 22x14cm, x,342 pp.. Minor rubbing. VG. dustwrapper. ¶ The recent controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Sensation!Show has further inflated the already burgeoning media profiles of British artists like Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Sarah Lucas, Jake and Dino Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin. British art has reinvented itself and successfully courted wider attention than it has ever received before. On the face of it, much of their art has looked like simple bad behaviour - using chopped-up animals, pornography and sexually explicit mannequins as its material, or building up the features of a child murderer using tiny hand-prints. Yet their art has been both accessible and sophisticated, appealing to the mass media and to the elite art world alike. But has it done so at the price of dumbing art down, reducing it to the level of any other consumer enterprise, and losing what is distinctive about art? Other than as publicity-fodder how seriously does it take the new audience that is so effectively courted? In this accessible book, Julian Stallabrass has written a sustained analysis of the British art scene, exploring the reasons for its popularity, the altered structure of the art world..." - Publisher's description.

Keywords: Art Criticism, Modern British Art, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Sarah Lucas,, Jake Chapman, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Contemporary