Clarity of purpose was never a YBA trademark, yet the only serious challenge to Hirst's leadership has come from someone who expresses her incoherence rather more lucidly than Hirst. 2001, Alistair Hicks, Mary Findlay, Friedhelm Hütte, Art works: British and German contemporary art 1960-2000, page 149:
Interestingly, the first work by a YBA (Young British Artist) to enter the collection was purchased from d'Offay […] 2002, Kent Logan, The Logan Collection, page 15:
The gold rush had begun with the YBAs in the 90s and was driven by cash from the former Soviet Union, the dotcom boom, the explosion in PR know-how, and opportunistic collectors such as Charles Saatchi. 2024 April 17, Charlotte Edwardes, “‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
To their critics, the YBAs, with their emphasis on sex, sensationalism and shock tactics, were doing little more than copying the tactics of the ad agencies. 2015, Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, Penguin, published 2016, page 110:
And the biggest thing was I didn’t want to die being some mediocre YBA artist from the 90s. I thought: that’s not me. What have I been doing? 2024 May 29, Simon Hattenstone, quoting Tracey Emin, “The radical, ravishing rebirth of Tracey Emin: ‘I didn’t want to die as some mediocre YBA’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
The YBAs created a new and accessible fusion of pop and conceptualism that had the distinctively British feel of an indie band. 2011 July 10, Ben Lewis, The Observer: