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‘The idea of being a professional artist who was paid was somehow vulgar and wasn’t really even seen as possible in England,’ says the Goldsmiths-trained artist Richard Patterson.

ARTRAGE BOOK HOW TO

Only once artists were established would a public institution take an interest in them, but without a gallery how to become established? It was catch-22. ‘Everyone was waiting in line, when do I get a show, do I have to wait till Howard Hodgkin dies?’ remembers the critic Adrian Searle. Apart from rare stars such as Julian Opie, who had been signed up by the Lisson Gallery after graduating from Goldsmiths, art students faced years of penury, supporting themselves through odd jobs before they could hope for a show at a private gallery. The art world functioned under a strictly prescribed code.

It was a desert,’ recalls former Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones.

The commercial scene revolved mainly around one thoroughfare: Cork Street in Mayfair, site of a string of upmarket galleries largely dealing in modern art. The London art world in the late 1980s prior to ‘Freeze’ was essentially a ‘very discreet gentlemen’s club’, according to the gallerist Sadie Coles. Because I hadn’t died, had I?’ The market’s validation of the work – with barely a murmur of disapproval from the press – and its subsequent loan to the Tate for ten years show just how far British artists have come since the late 1980s when the Goldsmiths generation burst onto the nation’s parochial art scene and changed the landscape irreversibly. It stopped being horrific and started to become beautiful. After barely managing to crawl to the kitchen sink for a grubby glass of water and staggering back to her bedroom, she describes how ‘I just suddenly thought, “This is horrific.” And then it all turned around for me. For Tracey, My Bed (1998) marked an epiphany in her life, a dawning of clarity after a week spent passing in and out of consciousness in an alcoholic haze following a devastating breakup with a boyfriend. Journalists filled column inches galore arguing whether it was a shameless self-promoting gimmick or a searingly honest self-portrait. When it was displayed for the 1999 Turner Prize shortlist, two Chinese pranksters had a pillow fight on the bed and a housewife tried to clean it with disinfectant. But Tracey’s My Bed dramatically polarized debate in Britain about whether it even deserved to be called art.

In itself the price tag wasn’t astounding given that Damien Hirst’s work regularly sells for more. The gavel’s thud sealed the market’s judgment on one of the most controversial icons of Young British Art, which with its in-your-face grimness and disregard for traditional artistic skill epitomized all that riled conservatives about the art of the 1990s. Tracey Emin’s rumpled bed, strewn with blood-stained underwear, used condoms, cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles, had sold for £2.5 million, more than triple the lowest pre-sale estimates. On the evening of 1 July 2014, a cheer rang out across the packed room as the Christie’s auctioneer brought down the gavel. A new book by Elizabeth Fullerton, Artrage! details that blistering scene and looks at its place today. Nearly 30 years on, and the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin remain some of the leading lights in contemporary British art. Back in the early 1990s, the British art world changed forever thanks to the YBAs.

Artrage book