Tate Britain's 90S Art And Fashion Show Divides Critics

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Tate Britain's latest exhibition,“The 90s: Art and Fashion,” launched on Tuesday night with a star-studded opening in London, drawing figures such as Donatella Versace, Givenchy's Sarah Burton, Burberry's Daniel Lee, photographer Ellen von Unwerth, and British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan. The show was co-curated by Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who oversaw the Condé Nast title from 2017 to 2024, alongside Tate Britain curators Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Alex Farquharson, and Celeste McEvoy.

While the opening generated considerable buzz, critical reception has been sharply divided. Waldemar Januszczak, chief art critic for The Times of London, called it a“fashion disaster,” stating,“I expected a celebration of the Nineties, instead it was a fashion disaster.” The Guardian's Jonathan Jones gave the exhibition one out of five stars, describing it as“a magazine spread,” adding,“I hoped what I'd seen was a prologue to more art, bigger art, with enough space to appreciate it. But no. That's it. You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of The Face in a dentist's waiting room.”

Conversely, Alastair Sooke, chief art critic for The Daily Telegraph, awarded the show five stars and found it“buzzing.” The Independent's Stephen Armstrong also gave it five stars, remarking,“the hope on the walls of this five-star exhibition is heartbreaking.” The focus on fashion over art in the exhibition's lead-up, including city-wide posters of Kate Moss photographed by Juergen Teller and praise largely directed at Enninful, has been noted.

Tate curator Jessica Vaughan explained the exhibition's aim, noting the 1990s was“this huge moment of growth and creativity, a time which really defined the parameters of what we now consider contemporary art. There was also this real boom in fashion and [the show] is about how they were feeding off one another and how the thematics were parallels in the things that these young creatives were interested in.”

Vaughan emphasized that a key goal of the exhibition is to highlight British artists beyond the predominantly white Young British Artists (YBAs). She addressed criticism for not including more prominent YBAs, stating,“The story of the YBAs is really well-known and some of the criticism we've got so far is that we haven't included those big names enough. There are works by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst there. We just wanted to spotlight other artists who we didn't think got their dues and Edward always did that in fashion.” The exhibition features artists such as Hamad Butt, Eileen Perrier, Yinka Shonibare, and Barbara Walker, whose names are not typically linked with the YBAs.

The show also addresses queer themes, which were often overlooked in historical accounts of the YBAs. An example is Butt's Familiars ( 1992 ), a three-part sculptural installation by the queer South Asian artist, which is part of the Tate's collection. This work invites viewers to interact with vacuum-sealed glass bulbs containing toxic chemicals, risking their release, which comments on homophobia and contagion during the AIDS crisis. When Familiars was last displayed at the Tate in the 1990s, one vial cracked, necessitating a gallery evacuation. Vaughan explained the work,“It's the idea that the thing that we're most attracted to might be the thing that's the most threatening to us and the work has a mythology around it.”

Another notable piece is Steve McQueen's 1993 film Bear, depicting two Black men wrestling with both affection and combativeness, imbued with homoeroticism. Vaughan posits that artists like McQueen, despite being as renowned as Hirst and Emin, are seldom presented within the YBA context.

The exhibition also explores the experiences of female artists, including Sam Taylor-Johnson's Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank ( 1993 ), a photograph of the artist in a T-shirt with the eponymous words and her white denim jeans at her ankles. (A recreation of the T-shirt is available in the museum's gift shop.) Nearby is Sarah Lucas's Chicken Knickers ( 1997 ), an iconic photograph featuring a raw whole chicken attached to a woman's underwear. Vaughan noted that the juxtaposition of these works with the Kate Moss images prevalent in the show's marketing campaign aims“to capture what it was to be a young woman at that time and to counter the images of Kate Moss by Corrine Day and others.”

Further, the exhibition explores contemporary relevance, with a room examining post- Margaret Thatcher Britain, featuring disused urban spaces and photography by Corrine Day and Juergen Teller. This section feels particularly timely given the current rise in right-wing politics in the UK, highlighted by British cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo's £36 million donation to the far-right Reform UK in September, the largest single donation ever received by a political party in the UK. A gallery dedicated to UK nightlife in the 1990s, encompassing queer parties, drum and bass, and acid house, also offers a poignant look at the past, especially as more than a quarter of London's late-night venues closed between 2020 and 2025. The exhibition is now open to the public.

Source: ARTnews

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