Description
Over a decade after Sensation and the advent of the YBAs, a new generation of artists has arrived, whose work collectively reveals an arresting insight into the future of contemporary art in Britain. In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty- Four, Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. This book turns that Orwellian vision on its head, showing that the range of visual languages being exploited and invented by these artists is in fact expanding and multiplying. Through sculpture, painting, photography and installation, they explore such issues as class, consumerism and the phenomenon of instant success culture, often with a distinctly British dry wit. More than sixty artists are included in Newspeak: British Art Now. One will be selected by the BBC2 television series School of Saatchi, in which six young artists, under the tutelage of some of the most influential names in the art world today, will attend a specially created art school over a period of three months. Charles Saatchi and a panel of experts will then chose one of the six and include their work in this Newspeak: British Art Now and the accompanying exhibition, which opens at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia in October 2009, and then travels to at the Saatchi Gallery, London in June 2010. The book will be published in two editions Russian and English and has been designed by acclaimed British graphic designer and typographer Jonathan Barnbrook.
