from: Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>
To: nettime <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>

Shock art turns on the Tate

'I'd rather go to Alton Towers than Tate Modern,' says rebel artist Chapman

David Smith, arts and media correspondent
Sunday November 2, 2003
The Observer

They have turned shock and awe into an art form and set the agenda for the
tumult over the Turner Prize. Now the Chapman brothers have broken another
taboo by biting the hand that feeds them.

Jake Chapman, half of the pair dubbed 'the Brothers Grim', has unleashed
an excoriating attack on the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries, accusing
them of threatening the future of art by bowing to the lowest common
denominator.

He called the Tate a 'monument to absolute cultural saturation' and said
he would rather take a ride at Alton Towers than look at some of its
contents. Charles Saatchi's gallery was 'simply an expression of one man's
ownership'.

Chapman attacked his fellow 'Young British Artists', saying they were part
of a growing cult of celebrity, and claimed some now use art as 'a symptom
of their ego'.

Although for centuries the world's greatest artists were forced to flatter
their patrons to scrape a living, the Chapmans clearly feel no obligation
to be polite about Saatchi, whose