I miss the New Labour years, when the government gushed money at cultural initiatives and Britain, previously a backwater in the art stakes, began to look like a serious international player. Sculpture was big and inescapable, and for a brief period it felt as though we’d found our groove: the Italians and Spanish had their old masters while New York bagged canonical modernism; France did both. But, from roughly the mid-1990s to whenever it was that Big Brother stopped airing, we had the best of the new – and ‘the new’, in character, was either ribald, bizarre or monumental. This last register, as executed by the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, was unashamedly populist but given legitimacy via the pseudo-philosophical rationale of its creators.
It’s not the artist’s fault that even the good stuff carries awhiff of super-yacht yuck
Aggressively self-righteous, Kapoor (b.1954) was by some distance the least likeable but also the most obviously oligarch-compatible. Gormley frequently worked high-minded talk about humanism or whatever into his art, but it was more difficult to square Kapoor’s lofty (if doubtless sincere) patter with his actual output. And yet he made some of the most memorable art of the period, giving us optical illusions that appeared to defy physics and gargantuan sculptural installations engineered with an unrivalled degree of precision.
