The 90s: Art and Fashion review – this isn’t an exhibition, it’s a magazine spread
Tate Britain, LondonThe Young British Art of the 1990s was brash and macabre but also intelligent and emotional. This breathlessly superficial show reduces it to a stylish poseJake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither.You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in whi
Jonathan JonesArtArt and design