Multiple Choice: Prints by Young British Artists Young artists in Britain faced an explosion of opportunity as the nineteen eighties drew to a close and the `nineties began. Social upheavals had inspired the creation of alternative structures for both professional and street culture. Thanks to the `eighties economic boom and an increase in the dissemination of information, artists had access at an early point in their development to a knowledge of the art market and its mechanisms, through an unprecedented volume of mediated material on international contemporary art. More over a heady cocktail of eighties materialism and a new strain of conceptualism meant that the action of the market as the primary engine for any kind of artistic success was not only openly recognised, but the deliberate manipulation of it as an artistic strategy was also validated. Within a new climate of initiative, groups of emerging artists realised that it was possible to engineer the opportunity of recognition through self-determination, and launch themselves as artmarket players independently of the recognised commercial channels. |