THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART

Photo: Hymn by Damien Hirst (1996)

At this time, too, Charles separated from Doris - Doris with her New York background, her east-coast and Sorbonne education, with whom Charles had built his collection of American art and opened his American-style gallery. It was at this moment that he made the alliance with a ragtag group of artists barely out of college and showing their work in East End warehouses - work he immediately recognised as the biggest revolution in British culture since punk. To Saatchi, Young British Art is very like punk, which he remembers fondly, though he no longer listens to the Clash (does that mean that White Riot was on the stereo as he worked to elect Margaret Thatcher?). Origin myths are a universal phenomenon, and Young British Art has its own Genesis, its own memory of birth. In 1988 Damien Hirst curated Freeze, an exhibition with fellow Goldsmiths' College art students and recent graduates including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy in an east London warehouse. In art-world legend it has become the equivalent to Picasso's painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or the Dada cabaret in first world war Zuric. In reality, says the critic and curator Carl Freedman, who was an intimate part of the tightly knit group that created Young British Art (he co-curated the key exhibitions with Damien Hirst and even helped to make Hirst's vitrines), it was a glorious time when they were all friends, but virtually no one came to see Freeze. "It would be interesting to know how many people saw it," he muses. And yet a lot of people remember being there.

Photo: So called "masterpiece" by Jenny Saville. Title: "Closed Contact 9", 1995.

They include Charles Saatchi. The story goes that he first encountered Hirst's work when he went to see Freeze in 1988. Saatchi was impressed not by the work - the only good things were Gary Hume's hospital door paintings and Mat Collishaw's photograph of a gunshot wound; Hirst only showed some corner constructions composed of painted boxes - but by the attitude. Freedman can't confirm that Saatchi saw the show: "I don't think so." His memory is that Saatchi "was taken round the degree shows by Michael Craig-Martin [artist and Goldsmiths' professor] and he certainly was aware of Damien's drug cabinet pieces". But he didn't buy anything then, or at Modern Medicine, the show that followed Freeze. The first acquisition Freedman can recall was from the next show, Gambler (1990). But the recent history of British art is fictive in a more profound sense than just who saw what when. British art is still living off the reputation it made at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, at the fag-end of the Tory years, when a grim vitality, a harsh poetry seemed to emerge in several media and generations. There were a lot more things going on at that time than just Hirst's Freeze; nor was Goldsmiths' the centre of everything. In 1987 Richard Wilson's installation 20:50, a reflective sea of sleek black oil, was shown at Matt's Gallery in the East End; since 1991 it has been on permanent display in the Saatchi Collection. This was a work by an artist with a concept of architectural intervention very different from Hirst's interest in potent objects. Another classic work of the period was Lucian Freud's series of portraits of the club star and lead singer of Minty, Leigh Bowery, a collaboration between an older artist and a youth culture star that was parallel to, yet different from, the Hirst generation.