Can there be Frieze without Cool Britannia? The optimism of the late 1990s period, defined by Tony Blair’s New Labour government and an expanding London gallery scene, instilled enough confidence in Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp to open the fair in 2003. With the arrival of Frieze, London reaffirmed itself as a global art centre.
This era, and how we remember it, is a prime topic of discussion this Frieze week thanks to Tate Britain’s show The 90s: Fashion and Art, which features star Young British Artists (YBAs) like Damien Hirst, as well as those names the era overlooked, such as the BLK Art Group founder Keith Piper. Meanwhile, as the major patrons of the period enter their golden years, their collections are coming to the block. Earlier this week, Christie’s sold £178m of art from the collection of the Monsoon founder Peter Simon, which included early works by artists from that era, including Mat Collishaw, Wolfgang Tillmans and Hurvin Anderson.
Many artists associated with Cool Britannia have long been central to the identity of Frieze London—it is difficult to imagine stepping into the tent without seeing works by Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin. Three editions of a neon by Emin, whose popular Tate Modern exhibition has now travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, sold at Xavier Hufkens for £95,000 each. Meanwhile, Sadie Coles HQ is offering some of Lucas’s most famous self-portraits from the 1990s on its stand.
Hollybush Gardens sold an installation of ceramic works by Lubaina Himid Photo: David Owens
Perhaps jarringly for those who lived through the era, some of these artists are now also found at Frieze Masters. Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert has sold early works by Rachel Whiteread from the 1990s, “priced up to £60,000”, including sculptures from her Torso series. Two paintings by fellow YBA Gary Hume have not yet been placed, but James Holland-Hibbert has recently staged solo shows of Hume’s 90s work accompanied by catalogues and new curatorial essays to offer “greater context for understanding these works and their significance with the benefit of hindsight”. Whiteread’s 90s works are valuable, Holland-Hibbert says, precisely because they “represent an important moment in understanding her wider practice”.
The past decade has also seen the rise of artists whose work was sidelined during Cool Britannia, such as Lubaina Himid, now considered one of the most important voices of her generation, particularly after her 2017 Turner Prize win and her British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Hollybush Gardens, the London gallery that began working with Himid in 2013 and which has been pivotal in making her visible on the art market, has sold most of the works by the artist from its Frieze London stand, including an installation of ceramic works and a diptych, with prices ranging from £45,000 to £120,000.
Growing institutional and market interest in this era comes as cultural figures posit a sense of renewed optimism in post-Brexit London as a return to the energy of the 1990s. In a Financial Times op-ed in August, Yana Peel, the Chanel Culture Fund’s chief executive, wrote “the last time the city felt this charged was in 1997—Cool Britannia”. She notes record levels of private philanthropy, notably the £150m donated to the National Gallery by the Julia Rausing Trust, as promising steps, while hoping for the “technology titans of today to invest in the artists of tomorrow”. On a more modest scale, directors of emerging galleries and avant-garde institutions also note a return “to a grassroots energy” of the 1990s to describe the recent proliferation of galleries and non-profit art spaces in the city.
‘Fabricated market moment’
But Hollybush Gardens’s co-founder Lisa Panting is one of several dealers who voice doubt as to whether a Cool Britannia revival is anything beyond “superficial”. She reflects on how this period was in fact a “fabricated market moment orchestrated by a few key players. There is a parochialism in how a handful of artists were thrust into becoming a movement. It simply couldn’t happen today, the scene is so much more diverse, there are so many more components to it now”. Moreover, Panting adds, “the social and economic conditions of today are vastly different”.
Certainly, focusing on the importance of private actors fails to acknowledge that many of the key artists and art dealers during Cool Britannia were the product of socialist education policies and a welfare state that were unravelled by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and then further by Blair. As one London dealer who began their gallery in the 1990s reflects: “My era was the last time you could live in London with no money.”
