London Calling (73 page)

In 2001 the Groucho was bought by Joel Cadbury, Matthew Freud and Rupert Hambro for £11.8m and was sold on in 2006 to the
private equity company Graphite Capital for £20m. The drugs are gone and the atmosphere is much straighter now – even the
old busted settee is gone; but nothing can stand still and it remains one of the best of the late-night London clubs. The
success of the Groucho quickly spawned imitators. The first was Auberon Waugh’s Academy Club, next door to the offices of
his magazine
Literary Review
, which opened in 1986. This was not really in competition as it is more like the Colony in scale, a single upstairs room,
and encourages a small membership who all know each other. Black’s, situated directly across the street from the Groucho,
attracted a younger crowd. As residents still live on the top floors the entrance is through the basement. In order to prevent
members from continually attempting to get in through the front door a sign was affixed to it which read: ‘No admittance to
Blacks’, the unfortunate wording of which quickly attracted the attention of the police.

The most serious competition comes from Soho House, which not only stays open until 3 a.m. but has an outdoor smoking terrace
on the roof, giving it a considerable advantage over the Groucho, which has nowhere for its smokers to go except out on to
Dean Street, where they are at the mercy of paparazzi and beggars. Recently Soho House has opened an even more opulent branch
in the East End. Shoreditch House is in the Tea Building on Bethnal Green Road and has its own gym, sauna and steam rooms,
private dining rooms, a two-lane bowling alley and, adjoining a large rooftop bar and restaurant, a sixteen-metre heated outdoor
pool incongruously surrounded by groups of smokers. The Colony Room closed in December 2008 amid a chorus of opprobrium and
lawsuits, leaving its shell-shocked members to roam Dean Street, searching for a friendly home. Soho is ever-adaptable and
ever the same and they were quickly absorbed into nearby drinking clubs.

The eighties are seen by many people as the beginning of the end for noncommercial art in London. Under Thatcher, artists,
galleries and museums were encouraged to get private sponsorship rather than rely upon government grants, even though the
country made enormous amounts of money from the art business through auction houses and Cork Street, and through museums and
galleries as tourist destinations. This had the predictable effect of restricting the type of exhibition held by the public
institutions to those approved of by big corporations and led to the ‘blockbuster’ shows where people shuffle past ‘great
art’ on timed admission tickets. It led to a greater commodification of art, and the creation of work that pandered to the
public taste. This is exacerbated by the disastrous move of amalgamating the art colleges into universities and colleges so
that instead of having the freedom to experiment and explore dead-ends, to make mistakes and chop and change, students are
now subject to regular assessment and evaluation as if they were studying maths. The aim is now to produce workers for the
‘arts industries’, a ghastly new hybrid created by arts consultants who know nothing about the actual creation of art.

From 1970, Saatchi and Saatchi had grown to become the biggest advertising agency in the world, with a staff of 16,000 people
in fifty-eight countries, allowing the art collector Charles Saatchi to spend around a million pounds a year on his hobby
of buying and selling paintings. This huge sum of money
inevitably had an impact on the market; he was the only big collector in Britain. Everyone wanted to sell to him, and to do
so they made the kind of things he might like to buy. In 1985 he opened an enormous gallery space in Boundary Road, St John’s
Wood, to exhibit his collection. At the same time, a new generation of artists were emerging from the art schools. Brought
up in the Thatcher era when greed and commercialism were celebrated, they treated art as a business, feeling that if they
did their apprentice years in art school they were somehow entitled to a career in art. Many of them, including Sarah Lucas,
Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing, Marcus Harvey, Anya Gallaccio, Michael Landy, Fiona Rae, Simon Patterson, Mark Wallinger, Abigail
Lane, Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst had attended Goldsmiths College, where they were encouraged and guided by their senior
tutor, the conceptualist artist Michael Craig-Martin. He was most famous for his work
Oak Tree
, consisting of a glass of water on a shelf and a semiotic text. (It was banned from entering the USA by customs officials
who believed it to be a plant. Craig-Martin had to explain that it was just a glass of water. This was no doubt an amusing
encounter.) Conceptual art usually only works in a gallery context – otherwise it just looks like the load of rubbish it often
is – so he taught his students how to present their work professionally.

In 1988 the second-year student Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst and a group of fellow students decided to mount an exhibition
of their work. Fairhurst had previously organized a show of student work that July but it was Hirst who took over as the main
organizer of this show, which they called
Freeze
, named after Matt Collishaw’s
Bullet Hole
, an enlarged photograph, taken from a pathology textbook, of a bullet wound to a human head and described in the exhibition
catalogue as ‘dedicated to a moment of impact, a preserved now, a freeze-frame’.
Freeze
opened in July 1988 in an empty administration building in the Surrey Docks and was jointly sponsored by the London Docklands
Development Corporation, who gave Hirst £4,000, and the property developers Olympia and York, responsible for building Canary
Wharf, who paid £10,000 for a professional catalogue. Craig-Martin used his contacts to persuade Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal,
director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, and Nicholas Serota, newly appointed director of the Tate, to visit the exhibition,
sending cabs to pick them up. Charles Saatchi bought Collishaw’s
Bullet Hole
directly from the exhibition. Many of the sixteen exhibitors in the show went on to become known collectively as the Young
British Artists, or YBAs, who were to dominate the British art scene for more than a decade, producing what the critic Julian
Stallabrass has cleverly dubbed ‘High Art Lite’. Hirst quickly became the best-known of
them, and was soon able to put into practice his widely quoted statement from 1990: ‘I can’t wait to get in to a position
to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment, if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and
then say “Fuck off”. But after a while you can get away with things.’ Damien Hirst’s £50m jewel-encrusted skull, or his 2008
£111m Sotheby’s show filled with works featuring gold, butterflies and diamonds, all designed to appeal to his wealthy collectors
and to look nice on the wall of a boardroom, are good examples of this in practice.

The imbalance caused by having only one modern art collector determined the artistic direction of scores, if not hundreds,
of artists desperate to sell their work. Saatchi was an advertising man, and he liked his art to have an immediate impact,
and if possible also to have a pun attached – rather like an ad. The Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili wrote: ‘A lot of artists
are producing what is known as Saatchi art… You know it’s Saatchi art because it’s one-off shockers. Something designed to
attract his attention. And these artists are getting cynical. Some of them with works already in his collection produce half-hearted
crap knowing he’ll take it off their hands. And he does.’
⁸

But there are still plenty of artists who are able to see beyond this, and the arts are still a breeding ground for genuine
free spirits who cannot be contained. Whereas someone like Gustav Metzger reacted to the big-money gallery system of turning
art into product by refusing to have anything to do with it, some artists today are more proactive. When Damien Hirst curated
a show called
Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away
at the Serpentine Gallery in May 1994, he included his own
Away from the Flock
, a sheep in a tank of formalde-hyde. Mark Bridger, an artist from Oxford, poured a bottle of black ink into the tank and
retitled it
Black Sheep
. Hirst was not amused and allowed the police to prosecute him. Bridger told the magistrate that he was surprised at Hirst’s
reaction as he thought they were on the ‘same creative wavelength’. He said: ‘To live is to do things, I was providing an
interesting addendum to his work. In terms of conceptual art, the sheep had already made its statement. Art is there for creation
of awareness and I added to whatever it was meant to say.’
⁹
He was found guilty of criminal damage and given a two-year conditional discharge.

It was left to Genesis P-Orridge to cause the biggest art fuss with a spectacular police bust which occurred on 15 February
1992, while he was away in Kathmandu, Nepal. A Scotland Yard S WAT team raided his house in Brighton with dozens of police
and with helicopter support. They seized more than two tons of archives: tapes, videos, manuscripts, film and posters, including
rare books and photographs by other writers and artists. When he returned
to London he was not charged with anything. It seems that the reason for the raid was his contravening the law on body piercing
and tattoos, both of which were apparently illegal, though use of a helicopter and armed police seems something of an over-reaction.
This was the same month as the appeal by fifteen gay men who were found guilty of assaulting each other while engaging in
private and mutually consenting sado-masochistic acts. Lord Lane set a legal precedent by declaring that any form of injury
or piercing to the body was illegal if it was done in the course of, or for the furtherance of, sexual pleasure because it
constituted ‘unnatural sex’.

The police told Genesis: ‘We know you didn’t do anything’, but they also refused to return his archives. They had ‘lost’ them.
Genesis: ‘They never charged me, nor did they return my archives. Responsibility for that has gone round and round to this
day. The stuff ’s either hidden in a warehouse or destroyed. Very Kafkaesque. I was symbolic of everything they didn’t like.’
¹⁰

Social Services then informed him that if he remained in Britain, his children would be taken into care. He sensibly went
into self-imposed exile in the USA. At the time of writing, sixteen years later, his archives have still not been returned.

The commodification of art has not gone unchallenged. Among the more amusing protests was an action taken against Tracey Emin’s
unmade bed. On 25 October 1999, at the Turner Prize show at the Tate, two Chinese performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian
Jun Xi, jumped on Emin’s
My Bed
stripped to the waist and intent on ‘improving’ the work, which they thought had not gone far enough. They called their performance
Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey
’
s Bed
. They had a pillow fight and attempted to drink from the empty vodka bottles Tracey had lying about before being removed
by security guards. Other visitors to the exhibition had responded by applauding, thinking it was part of the show and at
first the security people were also confused and did not immediately intervene. Police and security men were booed by the
public when they arrested Chai and Xi and took them away. It had been their intention to perform some ‘critical sex’ as they
felt ‘a sexual act was necessary to fully respond to Tracey’s piece’, but unfortunately they had no time. Chai said that,
although Emin’s work was strong, it was nevertheless institutionalized and said: ‘We want to push the idea further. Our action
will make the public think about what is good art or bad art. We didn’t have time to do a proper performance. I thought I
should touch the bed and smell the bed.’
¹¹
The artists were taken to the cells of Belgravia police station, where they explained their intervention to the police. ‘We
usually get a different type of artist down here,’ said one officer. No charges were
brought as neither Tracey nor the gallery wished to take the matter further. Further interventions by the duo included scattering
£1,200 around a room at Goldsmiths college to draw attention to the greed and commercialism of the art market, causing the
audience to scramble on the floor for the money. They also made an, apparently, unsuccessful attempt in the spring of 2000
to piss in Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain
, a urinal lying on its back and signed ‘R. Mutt’, at the Tate.

Members of ‘The Chaps’ had better luck with an action on 27 April 2006 when three young men, one with a monocle and old school
tie, all dressed like Bertie Wooster in tweeds, made a successful ascent of the south face of ‘Whiteread’, a 67-foot-high
mountain that was one of the dominant features of
Embankment
, an installation made up of 14,000 resin casts of cardboard boxes assembled by Rachel Whiteread in the Turbine Hall of Tate
Modern. According to the Chaps: ‘Gustav Temple, Michael Attree and Torquil Arbuthnot gasped audibly upon first witnessing
Whiteread, for it appeared to them to be the most unassailable monolith they had ever seen.’
¹²
At only ten feet from the peak, they were halted by the sound of a megaphone calling up to them but a swift scramble took
them to the summit where they planted the Union flag, drank a chilled martini and passed around a celebratory briar before
agreeing to descend. They were rather rudely ejected from the building. The Chaps had previously demonstrated against Rachel
Whiteread’s work in May 2004 when twenty-seven of them handcuffed themselves around her
Untitled (Room
101
)
in the plaster cast room of the V&A to protest against the intrusion of modern works into the celebrated nineteenth-century
collection of the world’s greatest architecture. When the sleepy guards took no notice, they climbed to the top of it and
dispatched the contents of several hip flasks of good quality whisky before being ejected.