Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art

These days artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers are not only big business but also, quite simply, celebrities. But they rose from obscurity back in the eighties and nineties in a then-semi-derelict part of east London by visiting upon the art world a set of artworks as outlandish and attention-seeking (not to mention scatological) as their general behaviour. This is the first account of how YBA (Young British Artists) came about, by the group’s only ‘embedded journalist’: an outrageously comic tale of White Cube openings, fights in pubs, vomiting into fountains and, eventually, the breakthrough exhibition Sensation. Throughout, Gregor Muir was there…