The Royal Academy may have been optimistic about calling the big group exhibition mounted in Burlington House Sensation, yet in practice it has been largely justified. The publicity has been lavish, comparable to that which surrounds the annual Booker Prize and, thanks mainly to the painting by Marcus Harvey of the Moors murderess, Myra Hyndley, there has been the essential element of scandal. Queues fill the courtyard outside, which must be gratifying to the organisers (and Norman Rosenthal of the RA in particular) in spite of some quite damning reviews from the London critics.
As many people will know by now, the works are all by young British artists and come from the Saatchi Collection, an institution about which several English artists of my acquaintance are less than enthusiastic. Some of them regard Charles Saatchi as strictly a go-getter businessman, which of course is no term of abuse, but they add that he might do better to confine his activities strictly to business matters and stay out of art dealing. Some time ago, in fact, he aroused strong criticism for selling off part of his collection with, so it is alleged, a minimum of consultation with the artists involved, and with deleterious effect on their market prices.
All of which may have very little to do with the ethos or quality of Sensation as an exhibition. Predictably, it is full of names which have emerged in British art over the past decade: Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hume, Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread, Fiona Rae, etc. A number of these have competed for the Turner Prize recently and two of them, Hirst and Whiteread, have won it; a high percentage, too, come from the Goldsmith College of Art. This is, in short, a typical high-powered, post-grad exhibition of today, crowded with ambitious young people out to make a quick kill or overnight reputation and, hopefully, win a nomination to the next Venice Biennale.
Harvey's painting of Myra Hyndley has already fallen a victim of reprisals - when I visited the scene of the crime, there was only a cordoned-off space there. An attendant told me that it had been vandalised (by an art critic, perhaps) and had been taken away to be "cleaned", which does not sound so serious. Judging only from the catalogue reproduction and from the printed comments of colleagues, it seems to have been a clumsy pastiche of the American artist Chuck Close, a much-respected figure in the Photo-realist movement.
Damien Hirst, if not quite the topical drawing-room sensation that he was two years ago, is still very prominent and all those glass cases full of sliced-up sharks and dead animals take up a great deal of space and pointedly call attention to themselves. Their initial shock value has largely evaporated, however, and already they resemble exhibits borrowed arbitrarily from a college of science or the dissecting department of a veterinary institution - in short, rather ugly and uninteresting to look at, unless you are in the trade. As for his efforts to paint, they are simply awful.
The other Turner Prize winner, Rachel Whiteread (seen in this year's Venice Biennale), is a good deal more interesting, even if she too takes up a lot of space to make her points. She has a genuine, sculpturesque sense of bulk and mass, and somehow her exhibits almost always manage to catch your eye and hold it. What is more, she can introduce an element of colour into her sculptures without losing her grip formally; her big failing is her consistent obviousness. What is chiefly depressing about the exhibition, however, is the all-round quality of the painting, which is unsubtle, sometimes technically poor, and too often given over to deplorably flat jokes and pointless visual conceits. (It is, in fact, quite remarkable how undergraduate and laboured most artists' sense of humour seems to be.) Whether they are delivered deadpan or with a heavy slap on the shoulder, they are almost always lamentably lacking in wit or real style. But more to the point, there is a bludgeoning tendency to overstate and rely on a single, poster-like, not-very-compelling image (perhaps this is due to misinterpreting the legacy of Warhol, whose influence seems to be returning?).
Fiona Rae, who already has a fair-sized reputation, is in fact a painter of sharply limited talents and surprisingly little originality. The most interesting figure in this area is Jenny Saville, who paints outsize female nudes which are sometimes "cropped" of their heads or other parts, or show the marks of surgical operations. The effect is neither erotic nor clinical; it has a distinctly human and touching, almost vulnerable dimension, and although Saville sticks to a limited palette and subject matter, she achieves a real monumentality. Since she was born as recently as 1970, plainly she is a figure to watch in contemporary British art.
Otherwise, some of the better work on view is in the photographs - for instance, Richard Billingham's or Adam Chodzko's. And Ron Mueck, who apparently used to work as a puppet-maker, shows an oddly moving, three-foot-long sculpture of a recumbent naked man, called simply Dead Dad. The various naked, and aggressively sexual, figures by Jake and Dinos Chapman have a whole area to themselves and have been given the equivalent to an X-certificate; they are artistically rather negligible, however - a kind of vaguely surreal cross between magazine quasi-pornography and horror films.
It is hard even to remember them afterwards with any clarity - which, of course, is also true of the exhibition as a whole. Quite simply, there is much too much of it, it smells of art-college opportunism and naivete, and some of it is also in the worst taste - and, presumably, was meant to be just that.
Sensation continues at the Royal Academy, London, until December 28th.
