In 1997 Norman Rosenthal, the Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy in London, took the audacious step of organising Sensation, an exhibition of the so-called YBAs, the Young British Artists who had transformed the London art scene since the end of the 1980s. The YBA umbrella was large and covered a plethora of artistic ways and means, but the best known artist was, and probably remains, Damien Hirst, whose pickled shark became an instant modern icon - and put shock tactics at the heart of the YBA agenda.
Sensation lived up to its name, provoking not only much controversy, and the resignation of several members of the Royal Academy, but also extremely high attendance figures.
Apart from the fact that the show put an official stamp of approval on the YBAs and the collecting-activities of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, nothing in it provoked more flak than Marcus Harvey's gigantic portrait of Myra Hindley, composed of thousands of children's hand-prints: it is a piece that seems to have little rationale other than provocation, and many people felt the Academy was diminished by its presence. Chris Ofili's picture of The Holy Virgin Mary, littered with genital images culled from pornographic magazines, and Jake and Dinos Chapman's obscenely embellished child mannequins also seemed designed to provoke.
Operating on the Hollywood principle of sticking with a winning formula, Rosenthal has devised a kind of sequel, Apocalypse, themed to millennial anxieties and taking its cue from the Book of Revelations. If it were a blockbuster, it would be called Sensation II: The Apocalypse.
However, while the initial show had its work done for it in that it essentially surveyed a huge range of activity and artists, Apocalypse is a more focused curatorial exercise, much quirkier and more out on its own, even if there is still a strong reliance on Saatchi as an arbiter of taste, in the form of the show's centrepiece, the Chapman brothers' much-hyped Hell, acquired by the collector for a cool £500,000 sterling. Apocalypse was formed in a manner typical of many thematic shows, by Rosenthal and cocurator Max Wigram trawling through numerous international possibilities, coming up with a shortlist and making a final selection, including such oddities as Maurizio Cattelan's blackly comic hyper-realist sculpture of the Pope felled by a meteorite, and Richard Prince's paintings which reproduce the texts of jokes.
Rosenthal argues for art's cathartic role. In a horrible world art must do more than appeal to beauty and harmony, it must take on discord. Looking at art that tackles horror can be a salutary, morally uplifting experience, he suggests. The problem is that people tend to look at horrible things out of other, more mixed motives - as, in fact, one of the show's more imposing pieces, the recreated, claustrophobic basement room of Gregor Schneider's creepy Dead House, with its horror-movie-set echoes of Fred West's basement, suggests.
By comparison, there is something simplistic about the Chapmans' model concentration camp Hell, distributed over many vitrines for ease of access, which invites us to examine the enactment of myriad atrocities with the odd, spurious, and incidentally unconvincing mitigation that the victims are Nazis, so it's okay really.
If you flag a show as being shocking, then it had better shock. Having put their case for the therapeutic value of depicting horrors, however, Rosenthal and Wigram quickly backtrack and, with the show's subtitle, provide an escape route for themselves: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art - more whimper than bang, then. In the event the beauty we see is inextricably bound up with kitsch (or otherwise compromised), given that it is represented primarily by Jeff Koons and Mariko Mori. The assumption here is pretty much the same as the assumption underlying the Chapmans' model-soldier Hell: we can't really take our beauty, or our horror, neat. It has to be approached at one remove, relocated between the irony of inverted commas, distanced, parodied, somehow diminished, anything that doesn't lead us into the loss of face seemingly implied by the admission that our feelings are directly and unequivocally engaged.
There are various ways of dealing with this state of affairs. In a way Darren Almond's Bus Stop is very effectively about not being able to make a work about Auschwitz. When he visited Auschwitz in 1997 he was taken aback at how strongly it affected him. His installation transposes the bus stops and shelters that stand outside the camp. The hard, rational forms, the inscribed timetable and the knowledge of where they belong (plus the fact that the temperature in the gallery has been brought way down) combine to create a genuinely chilling, disturbing effect.
The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans deals with a diminished world. His second-hand, bleached out, oblique, fragmentary pictures suggest a perpetual unease. At first glance they are so understated they seem almost banal, but there is usually a dark twist, a disturbing slant or detail, that accounts for their dispiriting power - such as the fact that his Pillows are taken from a detail of a pornographic photograph.
By contrast, Chris Cunningham, best known for music videos including work for Bjork and Madonna, and for the eerily morphed head in the Sony Playstation ads, shows a film in which real bodies, those of a man and a woman, are endowed with the strength and resilience of cartoon characters and subjected to a relentless regime of violence, sex and sexual violence. Cunningham could argue that he charts a relationship in terms of its brutal subtext, but there is a lingering nastiness about his work which, apart from the fetishistic technicality of its making, is actually quite heavy-handed.
PSYCHOANALYTIC theory has it that among the host of terrors that afflict the hapless infant, fears of dismemberment, castration, evisceration and mutilation figure large and much more vividly than we realise in later life. Though they are notoriously reluctant to disclose personal histories - "totally average" is the implication - and forcefully deny links between their art and their personal lives, one can only presume the Chapman nursery for some reason rated exceptionally high in the risk of dismemberment stakes. This is because the brothers have applied their art to the theme of bodily mutilation with a fixed, obsessive zeal, but also with a curious lack of feeling. The psychoanalytical idea might be that in constructing a scale-model holocaust, just as with their over-the-top, fetishistically sexualised mannequin portrait of their parents, they are signalling an acceptance of their subordinate role in the Oedipal framework of the family, settling for fantasy and play. It's all bluster, in other words.
After the horror, the beauty? Flavour of the month, Turner-shortlisted photographer Wolfgang Tillmans aims to find a jagged, awkward beauty in unorthodox areas, in casual, throwaway images of chance and transience, and is fairly persuasive. Tim Noble and Sue Webster's novelty turn is to collect garbage and carefully contrive it so that it creates shadow portraits of themselves. Mariko Mori's Dream Temple is a kind of kitsch pavilion of transcendence. It's left, appropriately, to Jeff Koons to sign off. His work in its shiny, perfect vacuity encapsulates both beauty and horror, especially his stainless steel Balloon Dog.
Everything he shows here reveals beauty in contemporary culture as an empty signifier, a terrible absence we disguise with extravaganzas of consumerist glitz and glitter.
It's hard not to like Koons, with his chutzpah and cheesy grin, and he sounds very much like a worthy successor to Andy Warhol when he remarks of his audience that "The public is my ready-made."
Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Con- temporary Art is at the Royal Academy, London until December 15th
