THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART

 

THE SAATCHI ARTISTS!!!

Leeds-born Marcus Harvey, 40 this year, hasn't been seen much since his anti-heroic antics at Sensation. It was the 11ft by 9ft portrait of Myra Hindley, remember, made out of stencilled children's handprints (and now on show in County Hall) that caused the very foundations of Burlington House to tremble and four distinguished Royal Academicians to resign their posts in disgust. Myra Hindley's evil face inspired sick artist Marcus Harvey to paint her portrait using thousands of children's handprints,' enthused the Daily Star while box office boomed. Splattered with ink and eggs and subsequently shut behind glass, Myra appeared to exhaust Harvey's creative stamina and output for years afterwards. Last spring, he was back - albeit in New York, not London. In his first one-man show for six years, Harvey showed five new pieces at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, including two archly contemporary still lives of the detritus left after an Ann Summers party; enormous dildos, handcuffs and other brightly-coloured sex toys of various function sitting luridly among the pizza crusts, dirty plates and overflowing ashtrays of the evening before. A large pink dildo thrust into a fruit bowl containing bananas - conventional still life subject matter rudely spiked by the apparatus of an intimate and very private sex life - is mildly amusing of course (but not, you'll be glad to know, remotely shocking). When Myra Hindley died last year, Harvey's infamous work was mentioned in almost every obituary, every news story. Now, perhaps, the notoriety of this early piece laid to rest alongside its malevolent subject, he can get down to the business of making more art, and showing it here.

Photo, right: Right: Begging For It by Gary Hume (1994)

A life less ordinary: Tracey Emin by Louisa Buck
Photo, left: Self by Gavin Turk (1991)

It's three years since Tracey Emin dominated - but didn't win - the 1999 Turner Prize with her infamous unmade bed, and now she's become Britain's most famous artist, outstripping even Damien Hirst as a household name. Yet there's no doubt that while Emin's desire to make an exhibition of herself strikes a strong chord with our current fascination for true-life stories and gut-spilling confession, her celebrity status tends to obscure the fact that she is also a powerful storyteller, a compelling performer and a sophisticated creator and arranger of unforgettable images. Few artists are as versatile. She paints, she writes books, shoots videos and makes tiny monoprints as well as huge sculptural installations. She produces neon signs and sews. While all of these deal with a life that has taken her from traumatic beginnings on the south coast to the gilded enclaves of the international art world, it's also worth remembering that, for all her working-class roots, Emin is no naif. Although she was later to reject the experience by destroying all her canvases and abandoning her studio, 'Mad Tracey from Margate' nonetheless received a first class honours degree from Maidstone College of Art and an MA in painting from the Royal College. So all this obsessive autobiography is underpinned by a rich knowledge of both recent and distant art history: as she herself has admitted, 'at heart, I'm a raving, hard-core expressionist'. Take the bed, for example. Continues next