STATE OF THE ART: A review of the 'Sensation' exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, September-December 1997 by John Molyneux

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj79/molyneux.htm

'Young, new, energetic, dynamic, cocky, cockney, rebellious (but not too rebellious, not Marxist or communist or anything old fashioned like that) sexy, successful, scandalous (in just the way that attracts the media and draws the crowds) and above all profitable and British - everything they ever wanted from an art movement and were afraid even to hope for.'

'300,000 plus attendance (which at seven quid a time is a lot of filthy lucre)'

'The Chapman brothers' Great Deeds Against the Dead is a lifesize fibreglass reconstruction of an etching of the same name by Goya from the series known as The Disasters of War. These etchings depict scenes of appalling brutality from the revolt of the Spanish peasantry against the Napoleonic army of occupation. They show piles of dead bodies, people being garrotted, mutilated and hacked to bits. Great Deeds Against the Dead presents us with two figures tied to the front joint and back of a tree trunk and castrated and a third figure hanging upside down over a branch of the tree, castrated, arms cut off and decapitated - the amputated arms also hang from the branch and the severed head is impaled on a smaller branch.'

'My objection to the Chapmans' piece, and I object to it vehemently, is not based on the subject matter it depicts. That is identical to the subject matter depicted by Goya and the Goya etchings are among the greatest works in the history of art: it is impossible to see them without being physically stunned by their utterly authentic presentation of the horror of war and, at the same time, moved by their profound humanity. Nearly 200 years on they retain - and thank god they do - all their power to shock but they contain (the word is appropriate) not an ounce of sensationalism. In contrast, the Chapman brothers have produced a piece of plastic kitsch in which the torture is drained of its terror and the art drained of its humanity. They have indeed committed 'great deeds against the dead''

'With Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x 1000) also by the Chapmans, it is not the dead but the living we have to worry about. Once again we have fibreglass mannequin type figures, this time children, about a dozen in all, melded together into an outward facing ring. Lacking sexual organs in the genital area, some of their noses are transformed into penises, some of their mouths into vaginas and anuses. The image as a whole is blatantly paedophiliac. This raises the question of whether the charge that a work of art is paedophiliac is in itself enough to condemn it'

images all from google