But Is it Art? (1966-1993) Great Artists in Their Own Words

This programme contains some strong language.

In the 20th century, something strange happened to art.

Traditions that had held good for centuries

suddenly felt badly out of date.

And a new breed of artists emerged to overturn them,

erasing the map of art, and redrawing it for a new age.

'All right. Stand by then, please.'

And something else had changed.

For the first time, television allowed artists to speak

directly about their work.

'Well, what kept you going, then?'

I can't say, just I kept going, something made me keep on going.

I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop myself.

'It forces you to do something in a different way.'

Come back over here where the light is.

In this series, we'll be digging deep into the BBC archives to hear

the story of 20th-century art first-hand - from the artists themselves.

Salvador Dali is very rich and Dali love tremendously money.

HE YELLS

In the final episode,

we tell the story of how a fringe group of radicals took on

centuries of art history

and won.

Breaking through the walls of the gallery,

tearing up the rule book and putting art on the front pages.

I would hope my work would be able to convey the sense of

serene order that, let's say, a fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach would do.

How some artists took art into the wide open spaces of deserts and mountains.

Art can be made anywhere in the world.

So there's no hierarchy of places say between mountain tops or museums.

How others rediscovered a fascination for the human body.

If you put your...knee...forward? Yeah. Absolutely.

While others delved into the darker recesses of their psyches.

I think she's only just tickling her at the moment,

but something horrible's going to happen.

And how the once-shocking innovations of modern artists

came to be prized by collectors and public alike.

I'm an enfant terrible, or I used to be.

Six million pounds, then - all done.

Up until the mid-20th century, art meant broadly two things -

painting and sculpture.

Artists created objects that could be easily shown, bought

and sold, to people with money.

STUDENTS CHANT

Then, in the late 1960s, just as the streets of Europe

and America came alive with the sound of protest, a generation

of experimental artists mounted a political protest of their own.

Is it art? What's it got to do with art?

You think you're an artist?

For good or ill, it would lead to one of the greatest revolutions in cultural history.

..Sunny intervals...

They rejected the idea that art had to be a unique physical object,

to be venerated in the gallery or sold on the market.

And by focusing more on the process than the finished work,

many of these artists left the gallery behind

as they tried to drag modern art out into the world.

Now, they claimed, art could be a performance,

A simple arrangement of industrial materials,

even GBH on an innocent piano.

Mr Ortiz, that seemed a perfectly inoffensive piano in quite good working order.

Why smash it to bits?

Because it's my enemy.

Because it's a symbol of structure

that imposes on my instinctual life as an artist.

MUSIC: "Pretty Vacant" by the Sex Pistols

For years, this artistic revolution seemed to be passing

the British public by.

Then, in 1976, one single event would see the entire nation wake up

to what was happening in art.

That year, ship builder's son Carl Andre found a work

he made in the late 1960s become front-page news

when it was purchased by the Tate Gallery.

There was just this suspicion,

this perpetual depressing relentless suspicion of contemporary art.

"What," asked an incredulous public, "was a pile of bricks

"doing in one of Britain's most prestigious art establishments?"

The person who believes himself that this is sculpture

is making fun of us. It's a pile of bricks!

In March 1978, Andre appeared on television to answer his critics.

But the true materials that you're talking about can be picked up

by anybody off a building lot.

And people get upset -

people who expect art to be precious and unique.

So why don't you deal in the sort of materials - like marble, for instance -

that people expect art to be made of?

Paint and canvas are not unique, either.

It is what is done with the materials of art,

not the materials of art themselves, which produce art.

When you buy a Rembrandt you are not paying for a weight of canvas

and a weight of pigment.

You are buying the work of an artist

and in my case, you're also buying the work of an artist.

Andre's controversial use of these unglamorous materials

placed him as a leading figure in an art movement known as Minimalism.

The term was first used to describe a group of American artists

who were united by the desire to strip art back to basic forms.

Minimalism wasn't about describing things.

It wasn't about making very obvious points.

It was a search for sort of core values.

For sort of deeper sculptural feelings.

And of course, when it worked, ah! I mean, it's...

it has an impact on you that going into a beautiful church can have

because it's based on an ambition to create these very deep, very sublime feelings.

While Andre's work may have appeared cerebral or remote,

his use of industrial materials stemmed directly from his own personal experience.

From 1960 to 1964,

I worked as freight brakeman or guard on the Pennsylvania railroad

which is now bankrupt - I did not contribute to that, I hope.

And I did that just to survive, to earn a living.

But I think that was my final art academy, the railroad.

I had the opportunity to really work with the engines and the heavy cars,

and the tracks and the yards, and, er...

The marks that I've made on canvas or paper

have never been to convincing to me

in the way that moving a timber or brick from

one side of the room to another.

I guess I require the tactical relationship to my work

rather than the visual projective one of painting or drawing.

Carl Andre's bricks were really intriguing.

I think they made us look at very, very basic primary forms

and substances in very new ways. I think in doing that,

that was a really new thing in the history of art.

The 1970s saw several artists take art outside the gallery altogether.

One of them was the British artist Richard Long -

sculptor, rambler and nomad.

OK, cut.

Richard Long was born in the West Country in 1945.

Aged only 22 years old and a student in London, he created

his first important art work - A Line Made By Walking.

The work was a faint line that appeared for a short while

after Long walked back and forth in a field.

But it was also the photograph of the line itself.

For me, he is simply one of the greatest English artists of all time.

Because everybody saw that this very young man had discovered something

that was there all the time, but which nobody had understood before.

Like that early sculpture, nearly all of Long's works are based

on walks - often made through some of the most remote places on Earth.

Long creates his art solely from the natural environment

he encounters - turning ancient rocks, stones and dirt

into spontaneous sculptures using his own body as his only tool.

For Long, the process of making these works

is as important as the photographs, maps and prints he creates.

Long has always cultivated mystery.

He never reveals the exact locations of sculptures

and he rarely speaks in public.

In 1983, he made one of his only television

appearances on BBC's Omnibus.

I like the idea very much that people can know that

art can be made anywhere in the world, wherever the artist is.

So there is no hierarchy of places, say between mountaintops or museums.

Each particular work on its own is very simple. Stones, circles, lines.

I think it has more layers of meaning and resonance taken all together

because I work in different forms.

I make walks, I make maps so formally, it is quite wide.

The idea of a walk being a piece of sculpture was quite provocative

and even puzzling.

It is not the movement which is the work in his case,

it is where he goes and what he does.

I think I am interested in empty places.

Places which are almost abstract, I think.

So whatever you do in them - whether it's just walking a line or

walking a circle, throwing some stones around.

It's sort of, something is happening in the middle of nothing.

Now what has been happening in landscape art since 1950?

Well, something quite unprecedented in the case of Richard Long.

Born 38 years ago in Bristol

and now an artist of very considerable international repute.

In 1983, Long's radical take on sculpture provoked a bad

tempered debate in the Omnibus studio, chaired by Richard Baker.

The Tate Gallery's David Brown clashed with poet

Edward Lucie Smith, over that eternal question...

Is it art? What makes you say it is art?

Because Richard Long says it's art.

And his arrangement of stones and his work.

If people say something is art,

-we have to proceed on the assumption that it is.

-Is it art?

A lot of people say things are art, but they're not very interesting.

-Is it art?

-He says it's art...

-That is assertion.

-You see, it's assertion.

-Of course, it is bound to be.

No, it isn't.

Can you define what art is, Ted?!

I am not even going to try,

and I won't be put in that position by you or anybody else.

Long's work doesn't say,

if I put it in a gallery, it becomes a work of art.

What he says is, there are things we can put in a gallery that will

naturally obliterate the barrier between the gallery

and the outside world, which will make your aesthetic

sensibility and your mind roam freely between these two realms.

'Ladies and gentleman, if those passengers seated to the left

'side of the aircraft would care to look out of their window,

'they should be able to see down below them a rather unusual sight.

'The large white area you can see there glistening in the sun

'is the work of the artist Christo.

'Who, believe it or not, has come over here to wrap up the coast.'

In the 1970s, Bulgarian exile Christo

and his wife Jeanne-Claude became the world's leading creators

of a kind of art that left the gallery a distant memory.

Claiming to be breaking down the barrier between contemporary art

and the public, they wrapped objects as diverse as bridges,

buildings and even entire islands.

Unlike other public artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude

wanted to draw our attention to what was already there -

by simultaneously hiding and revealing our own world to us.

For art to really get out of the gallery successfully,

it needed to appeal a lot of people.

And an artist like Christo, he is a show-biz artist.

And for the big wide world to notice what was going on in art,

you needed to become a noisy figure.

In 1977, Christo announced his most controversial project yet.

At a time when the Cold War had split Europe in half, Christo,

a former propaganda artist who worked under Stalin,

announced on the BBC his plan to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin

in 100,000 square metres of silver nylon cloth.

The problem, or the challenge, was that the Reichstag straddled

both the Western and the Soviet-controlled zones of the city.

Each project, each of my projects, I try to bring new dimensions

and new value to my work.

Reichstag is in the jurisdiction of the Bundestag in Germany,

the parliament, but also the Four Allied Forces

which has been sitting for the last 30 years in Berlin.

It is in a British military zone entirely.

But part of the East facade of the Reichstag is 60cm deep

and 20 meters long in the Soviet territory zone.

So you will have to get into Soviet territory?

-You'll have to do that in Soviet territory?

-Yes.

-In East German territory?

-Yes.

Christo and Jean Claude's ideas, such as the Reichstag

and his 27 mile long fence through California,

have faced legal wrangles and an often hostile public.

It's a bunch of garbage. That's art?

Some lousy curtain coming through here?

Bunch of city slickers looking at it?

To hell with it! I am against it. I think it's stupid.

Somehow, they always seemed to pull it off.

Though it took the fall of the Berlin Wall

for the Reichstag finally to be wrapped.

The Running Fence project in two weeks was seen by 700,000 people.

There is no one museum showing in the world of contemporary art

that has that many people seeing modern art.

It's not only the object, it's what people think, how the

coastline can be used, how the road can be used to see a work of art.

Their fame helped Christo and his wife to publicise and pay

for their entirely self-funded projects all over the world.

Here in Britain, another pair of artists began to court

the attention of the public - though in a rather more British way.

THEY BOTH SCREAM

GEORGE SCREAMS

GILBERT SCREAMS

Gilbert and George, two people but one artist,

describe themselves as Living Sculptures.

HE SCREAMS

They live and breathe their art 24 hours a day,

creating enigmatic performances

and striking photomontages that draw on their own lives in East London.

Their work tackles many of society's biggest taboos -

from sex,

to obscenity

and religion.

BOTH: We like very much to be unhappy.

BOTH: We like very much to be sober.

In the late 1970s, the Italian born Gilbert,

and George, from Plymouth, became cult stars.

But for them, acclaim from the art world alone was not enough -

they wanted to become household names.

Throughout the 1980s,

Gilbert and George turned up on a bizarre range of BBC television

programmes, beginning with teenage pop series the Oxford Road Show.

This is Gilbert and this is George.

Some people say your work is right wing propaganda.

They call you fascists.

Others say your work exposes our hidden fascism.

They call you anarchists. Which view is closest to yours?

BOTH: Both views are equally important.

The thing about Gilbert and George,

they are using the medium for exactly what it is intended to do.

But at the same time, when you see them being interviewed,

they are subverting it.

They understand how it works but they're not behaving properly.

In 1990, their status as the Morecombe and Wise of the art world

was confirmed with an appearance on the BBC's flagship chat show, Wogan.

Something guest host Jonathan Ross may have regretted.

I'll tell you what this reminds me of.

Do you remember the old episodes of That Was the Week That Was?

It used to be John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Standing in a line.

And they'd say, "I look down on him, because he is lower class".

Do you remember that?

No, we don't know them. AUDIENCE LAUGH

The times I have seen them on chat shows, they are brilliant.

They really sort of nonplus the interviewer.

At the time, as an artist I would watch them on telly

and I would be going, "Pffff!"

They just could not get them at all. They were great and very funny.

# Angels help us... #

Gilbert and George pulled off a really good trick.

Because what they said was, "Oh, well, we don't like the art world.

"It's too high brow.

"It's full of these people who say they are so clever.

"We want to speak directly to the people."

BOTH: We like very much to be drunk.

So, they kept saying, "Our art is accessible to all."

Without realising the truth,

which was that their art was just as inaccessible as everybody else's,

probably more so because so much of it was so silly.

Want some more?

With the provocative, even downright baffling, art

that dominated the 1970s,

something seemed to have disappeared - an interest in the human body.

Over in New York, one artist, ignored by the art world

for much of her life, emerged to reinstate the body at the heart

of contemporary art, where it would remain throughout the 1980s.

In her Brooklyn studio, sculptor Louise Bourgeois made art

out of wrestling with her own, very personal demons.

I don't say I am a wild beast all the time,

but I am a wild beast some of the time. Right.

She was amazing because she is like a witch from Grimm's fairy tales.

A small, birdlike carapace of a body that was filled with

extraordinary electric venom.

Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911,

and came to America on the eve of the Second World War.

Her life and work spanned the 20th century,

and she counted Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol amongst her peers.

Louise Bourgeois was undoubtedly one of the rediscoveries of that period.

So although she was always there, she was never appreciated properly.

And look how important her work is.

And not only how important it is,

but how directly it approaches women's issues.

Feminine issues. Issues that are usually avoided by art.

Following Louise Bourgeois' late blooming in the art world,

BBC's Arena flew to New York for a stormy encounter

with this enigmatic figure.

(MAN) Well, I can't agree to that.

Don't be like that. Don't say that.

What I'm trying to understand is why you're so...what it is you're

so worried about me... (SIGHS)

What it is you're resisting, really.

Bourgeois' evocative work in stone, rubber and bronze focused

almost entirely on the human body,

made to seem disturbing, but oddly vulnerable.

She put her heart and her soul into it

and that is where Louise is a very strong woman.

She used these fantastic materials, that were really heavy, that were

really masculine, but uses them in a really feminine way.

So there is a paradox there, which is exciting.

And quite sexy and everything.

Bourgeois may have come across as strong to some,

but underneath the temper lay a hugely damaged individual.

There it is. And the dealing with depression is really something

that we better not talk about.

Do you use anger in a creative way?

I use anger, it is raw, it is a raw emotion.

It is my way of defending myself.

Sometimes it frightens people, but it really doesn't frighten people.

People take you for a pushover.

Bourgeois biggest inspiration was also the source of her

greatest pain and anger - her childhood.

You see, the human condition is the relationship of man to woman.

I was brought up in a family where the violence was present

and one of the things my mother did,

when the anxiety of my father crept up, she knew that before every meal

so she put a little pile of saucers next to his plate.

-When anxiety came...

-PLATE SMASHES

While in her 80s, Bourgeois began obsessively revisiting

and recreating her childhood home in a series of chambers

she called "Cells".

In order to liberate myself from the past, I have to reconstruct it,

ponder about it. Make a statue out of it.

And get rid of it, through making sculpture.

I am able to forget it afterwards.

I have paid my debt to the past and I am liberated.

This is like a prison you have put it into?

Yes, it is. It is. Because I am a prisoner of my memories.

I have been a prisoner of my memories

and my aim is to get rid of them.

A few blocks from Bourgeois' Manhattan home,

photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was also taking a renewed

interest in the body - but in quite a different way.

Twist your body around.

These are images which cut into you consciousness

and are there for the rest of your life.

That is a great achievement with an artist.

Mapplethorpe was much in demand for his cool, black and white

celebrity portraits that caught the eye of the Manhattan elite.

But this former altar boy's true notoriety came from feverishly

documenting the extremes of New York's gay subcultures.

These explicit erotic images, as starkly shot as any

of his photographs of famous faces, outraged conservative America.

As part of this process of people who'd been marginalised by the

art world, all kinds of artists were finally allowed to have their say.

Feminine artists were part of that and gay artists were part of that.

Of course, there was plenty of homosexuality in art

but it wasn't as explicit as it was in Mapplethorpe.

In 1988 he was profiled by the BBC's Arena -

a broadcast that had to be heavily censored.

There was a feeling I could get looking at pornographic imagery

that I thought had never been apparent in art.

Did you set out to shock?

No. No. I mean...

No, I mean, it was too selfish. It was about me wanting to see things.

It was certainly me first, and secondary to that was the audience.

I was always amazed that it shocked.

Because once I had a photograph, and had take it,

it was not shocking to me any more, I'd been through the experience.

Mapplethorpe successfully blurred the line

between pornography and art.

Yet, some of his most memorable images are not of people -

but flowers.

But the strange thing for me

is they don't have any innocence about them, they have all kinds of...

Yeah. It sort of amazes me. There is a certain edge to them.

They are not...sweet.

They have a certain...they're New York flowers, somehow.

But again, I think they are mine.

Nobody else can photograph flowers the way I do.

Somehow I was able to pick up the magic of the moment

and work with it.

That is my rush in doing photography.

You get to a place, and you can do it with a flower,

you can do it with a cock, you can do it with a portrait

where it's really kind of like,

you don't know why it's happening but it's happening.

You've somehow tapped into a space that's magic.

Back in London, a British artist

was also obsessively depicting the human body.

Though a long way from the provocative images of Mapplethorpe,

the work of Lucian Freud still had the power to startle,

but with the traditional medium of paint on canvas.

I remember Lucian Freud taking on the whole of art history.

Unusually for a British painter,

he was seeking to position himself in the canon.

He was up there with the Rembrandts, the Rubens,

the Michelangelos, the Picassos.

He was trying to be an artist of that stature.

Born in Berlin in 1922 to Sigmund Freud's youngest son Ernst,

Freud fled to London with other Jewish refugees

fleeing Nazi Germany.

Freud had been a peripheral figure in art since the 1950s.

He was best known for his hell-raiser lifestyle

and friendship with fellow artist Francis Bacon.

He was a troublemaker from the start.

I think he was expelled from two schools,

he burnt down the third school

and he remained a troublemaker throughout his life, really.

He was a big drinker, he was a reckless gambler.

Freud's dazzling ability to evoke flesh in thick layers of paint

came at a time when figurative painting was becoming popular again.

Put your knee forward, yeah. Absolutely.

This remarkable footage is the only known film of Lucian Freud working,

shot in 2011 by assistant, David Dawson.

It would be Freud's last day of painting before he died.

Quite.

This remarkable picture is one of a series of self portraits,

as far as Freud was prepared to go in revealing himself.

But in 1988, he broke his silence to speak to the BBC

in a rare television interview.

I never think about technique. In anything.

I think it holds you up.

I think if things look wrong or ugly in a way which actually clogs

the information or feeling you are trying to convey

then obviously you are going about it the wrong way.

You have to take the paint on trust.

You don't, as a rule, use models that work at being models.

No, I haven't really because I quite like the idea of them posing

being a specific part of something they are doing for me.

With models, they would have an idea about posing in itself

which is exactly what I am trying not to do.

I want them to be themselves.

In a career spanning almost 70 years, Freud is best known

as the artist who brought nudes back into contemporary painting.

The nude is page one, chapter one, paragraph one of what you do in art.

It is the great classic subject of your old master painter.

And by taking it on so directly, I think Freud was quite

deliberately taking on the whole of art history.

If you are painting humans,

you've got the best subject matter in the world

and you can really do as much with them as they could do themselves.

And when I am not painting them, which is rare,

I feel I am being pretty frivolous.

The rebirth of figurative painting was not confined to

the nudes of Lucian Freud.

For one of Freud's contemporaries, painting was the perfect way

to tell stories that explore the outer limits of human behaviour.

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935 and like Freud,

escaped fascism in her place of birth to settle in Britain.

Similarly for Rego, the 1980s were a turning point

as she discovered a new audience for her work.

She goes into places that very people go in her work,

with extraordinary vigour.

People did not understand what she was doing.

Then she sort of went to the backwater, now she has come

to the forefront again because people want to be touched by something.

People want some emotion. They don't want the white canvas any more.

In London, Rego attended the Slade School of Art

and developed a love for Victorian children's illustration,

an influence that endures to this day.

The way I paint, on the floor, is a bit like a playpen.

You know, when you are little you are in the playpen

and you've got all your toys around you so you take what you like

and make stories with what you've got.

I had a playroom where I was supposed to be most of the time.

And, of course, I was on my own as I had no brothers or sisters.

And I didn't know other children to play with.

So I spent a lot of time in there, drawing.

-My mother said she could hear me doing....

-SHE HUMS

You know, this noise you make when you draw.

-Even now, I do that.

-SHE HUMS

And if she heard that she knew I was all right.

I think it was possibly quite a good training for a painter.

She really does still have that quality of childlike immediacy

without being naive or simple or anything at all.

But the child figure is central to her imagination and her work.

Rego's naive playfulness contrasts sharply with subject matter

that often delves into the dark corners of her imagination.

This is The Maids by Genet except it isn't entirely that.

Because there's another character in it, the little girl,

who does not appear in the Genet play.

Well, she is about to do to this girl,

I think she's just tickling her

at the moment, I don't think it's anything too serious,

but something horrible is going to happen.

For me, pictures are better equivalents to feelings.

I mean, I think that you can't...

There are things you can't express obviously in words -

which you don't even know what they are, really.

Paula does not really give a damn what people think.

She is just on her own trajectory. She's doing her own thing.

And she always has been.

We go to Paula's world. She doesn't have to come to ours.

Rego's paintings are often based on her own experiences.

Most personal of all, are a number of works

reflecting on caring for her late husband, artist Victor Willing.

My husband Vic was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis in 1966,

the same year my father died.

Then as things got worse, I think really I was just terrified.

So everything I did was in the pictures.

The monkey beating his wife, and the bear and pregnant rabbit.

And all that, it was not like keeping a diary

but was like writing your own story in images.

Victor's illness was perhaps most poignantly reflected in one

of Rego's most striking works of the 1980s, The Family.

For me, he is incredibly important in every way.

My work is...I do it for him, number one.

But the revolutionary spirit in art was far from over.

In 1970s Germany, the country experienced its own

renaissance of politics, arts and culture as the nation's youth

sought to define a new identity and free itself from the Nazi past.

One artist would emerge

to put a face to the emotions of a generation.

Joseph Beuys - anarchic, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment.

Joseph Beuys to me is a more mysterious person.

To me, he is very inspirational.

He was just an extraordinary character.

Almost like he smelt differently.

I think he really did take his role as a seer

and teacher very seriously.

Beuys defied categorisation, moving from sculpture to happenings

and even politically charged pop songs.

# But the people of the States don't want it

On the BBC's art series Riverside in 1983,

he claimed his art was directly shaped by his own

experience as a Luftwaffe pilot during World War II.

When I was shot down in the Crimea during the Second World War,

I was rescued by tribespeople.

They took me out of this crash heap of an airplane

and brought me to felt tent.

Wrapped me with felt and tallow, as an ointment, to keep me warm.

This was an impulse for me to be reminded

when later on I tried to develop a kind of theory.

Especially a theory of warm sculpture.

Beuys' near death experience shaped his career.

Fat and felt - the materials he believed the tribesman used

to save his life, resurfaced in many of his sculptural works.

Crucially, it was also this act of kindness that directly

informed his sense that art had the power to heal.

I think Joseph Beuys is more like a heroic poet.

You can see this sincere ideology.

He is trying to make the world become a better world.

By the late 1970s, Beuys had become a global figure.

The remainder of his career was spent as an art nomad -

exhibiting, performing and staging happenings across the world.

Such as the three days he spent in New York,

locked inside a gallery with a wild coyote.

A year before his death in 1986, Joseph Beuys came to London to

mount his final political statement, Plight.

The installation saw the entire Anthony D'Offay Gallery

plastered floor to ceiling in reams of felt, with a grand piano,

blackboard and thermometer as its centrepiece.

When you were in the room, you heard your heart beating.

You heard things in your body that you never experienced before.

You felt as though you were in another world.

As Beuys explained to the BBC, the work symbolised his belief in the

transformative power of art against the negative forces of capitalism.

Art is not there to be understood.

Art is a thing you have to identify with.

Art contains the elements of creativity that exist you,

which is presently alienated by government over the people.

From powers that are infiltrated by the media.

The interest that come from the market, from capitalism,

from the interest to make profit and to try to gain power.

# The best things in life are free

# But you can give them to the birds and bees

-# I want money

-That's what I want

-# That's what I want

-That's what I want... #

Beuys was fighting a rearguard action

against the advance of capitalism.

The stock market boom of the 1980s saw money pour into the art world

as traders looked to modern art as a safe investment

for their newfound wealth.

£7 million.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man

I am a very clever person.

I think I could be making even more money in another field.

In another area.

I am limited to the income I can have as an artist.

I could make maybe several million year, if I am extremely successful

but I could never come into the hundred million a year range,

the half a billion a year range.

For the past 30 years, Jeff Koons has cultivated

a reputation for pushing taste to the limit.

He specialises in turning everyday objects into high art

by hiring skilled craftsman to turn his ideas into expensive sculptures.

To cover the heavy costs of creating his early work,

Koons spent six years as a commodities trader on Wall Street.

At the same time, by his own admission,

he began to manipulate the art market in his favour.

A piece like my Aqua Lung that may have cost 20,000 to make,

I would sell for 4,000.

And then end up giving the gallery a 50% cut of that

and walking away with 2,000, taking a 17-18,000 loss on a piece.

But I did that only because I wanted them to go to collections

and if I was going to penetrate, it was time to penetrate.

When Jeff Koons arrived, everybody said the same thing -

he is a merchant banker and has decided to become an artist.

So he has brought all the know how of the Wall Street operator to art.

And so, right from the beginning,

from the very first mention of Jeff Koons, there was suspicion.

Certainly art critic Robert Hughes, needed some convincing

when he met Koons for the BBC in 1996.

Hi, Jeff. A kitten in a giant sock. Tell me about it.

It is a piece working in a very classical

tradition of the crucifixion.

And also dealing with spiritual themes.

Well, I don't see much spirituality there yet.

I see a very large and playful pussycat in a sock.

How are you going to inject spirituality into this image?

I am going to give the cat more Bambi-like eye lashes.

Very spiritual, Bambi, yeah.

I try to make works that are...

that are very generous.

I try to be as generous as I can be with myself.

What do you mean by "generous"?

How is this more generous than some other of kind of sculpture?

What's generous about it?

I think it is communicating love, it's communicating happiness.

And it does not alienate anyone.

I think that a young child could come here, a five-year-old child,

could look and find some pleasure and some enjoyment.

And I hope it is something positive for humankind.

Koons' most memorable work was also his first financial

breakthrough, the Banality Series that began in 1988.

The series saw the kind of kitsch objects found in gift shops

spun into oversized sculptures, that divided critics.

I was very pleased with the response to the work.

I was glad that the work did generate a response

and did not go unnoticed.

These images of banality and dislocated imagery

is what the bourgeois respond to.

This is what the ads they respond to in Vogue magazine are based on.

But at the same time, they also feel the guilt and shame of this.

As Koons' self-produced adverts showed, he was a new type of artist,

unashamed about his desire to make money from art.

By the end of the 1980s, the boom years were well and truly over.

Across the Atlantic, Thatcher's Britain seemed a divided land.

The shift of money and power to the masters of global finance

left many workers feeling marginalised or excluded.

The British art world was no different, dominated

by a handful of galleries that ignored the work of younger artists.

It was time to rediscover the radicalism of previous generations.

We all think that Damien Hirst was always a gigantic figure.

Well, no, he wasn't in the beginning, he was a nobody.

And yet, this nobody took on the art world in a most explicit way.

In 1988, Damien Hirst was just another ambitious art student

when he organised Freeze, a showcase of talent from Goldsmiths College.

And the BBC were intrigued enough to send

the Late Show's Matthew Collings to meet a 23-year-old Damien Hirst.

So what does everyone at the school think?

Well, there is a bit of mixed feelings.

It's separated the school into two halves.

A lot of people are anti-Freeze and a lot of people are for it.

The ones who are anti-Freeze, why are they that?

I don't know, any kind of success, people don't like it, do they?

The art world was Thatcherite.

The art world was the world that said,

these are the rules, and if you don't do it this way,

you are going to have your bottom spanked.

And he comes along and he does it differently.

It was a rebellion, a revolt.

Bypassing the traditional gallery system,

Damien Hirst and the other 15 artists featured at Freeze

would be propelled into the art world spotlight,

to become known as the YBAs or the Young British Artists.

Not many people got the fact that Damien was going to be the biggest,

and most ambitious, and the most creative artist of them all.

Why did they shoot it?

To kill it!

To kill it!

She had a calf and she never got over calving.

Oh, right.

In the early 1990s, Hirst began a series of now iconic works

that thrilled some and appalled others,

featuring dead animals in various states of decomposition.

Should we go get a burger?

The works were an instant sensation.

One of the most celebrated, Mother and Child Divided,

made its debut at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

HE MOOS

What is art for me? I think that is quite a difficult question.

I think people who say that what I do is not art,

it is very easy I think to say what isn't

but it's very difficult to actually do something.

People who don't even like art, they go, ooh.

It's just an interesting object. I hope it makes the world richer.

People like to see things like that.

I don't expect them to walk in and go, "Ooh, life and death."

Or, "Oh, my God, it is about the texture of ennui

"and the quality of life and the horrific society."

If they go, "Ooh, wow, that's fantastic, I am really pleased."

I think it should work on many levels like that.

Part of a wider shift that saw yesterday's rebels become

today's mainstream, Hirst, the former enfant terrible has

become the most famous and wealthiest artist in the world.

Here in Britain, his many works on the theme of life and death

have transformed him into a household name.

And they marked a turning point for the way we,

as a nation, engage with contemporary art.

Artists used to be minor figures working away in their attics,

unnoticed, and then suddenly that changed

I now declare the Tate Modern open.

Britain, a nation of art haters, turned into a nation of art lovers.

The big change in my lifetime about contemporary art in this country

is that a lot more people are interested in it.

Most people now, if you say, "Damien Hirst's shark" to them,

they'd probably know what you are talking about.

Thank God, I'm in a period when art has a bigger audience.

Art moved from the back pages of the newspapers to the front page.

And that has unquestionably been the big story of art in my lifetime.

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