Lucky Kunst by Gregor Muir

The entire YBA generation appears throughout the pages of this easily-readable book as seen through the jocose but attentive eye of Gregor Muir – today running the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. A personal diary, rather than a book, it narrates the exhilarating yet acidic stories of the Young British Artists: from being Goldsmiths students setting up provocative shows to becoming undisputed stars of the art market.

What I loved about Lucky Kunst was Muir’s ironical way of judging events and characters. For instance, while describing the lavatory presented as art by Sarah Lucas in an exhibition at the ICA, we read that Duchamp’s urinal was "one of the most controversial artworks ever made," but also that Lucas "went one better" as hers was actually plumbed in (!).

Lucky Kunst provides an interesting yet not so much critical retrospective on both YBA art and those irreverent personalities that contributed to build the cult of the modern rebel artist: distanced from the city (as society) but inextricably bound to it. Through Muir I was able to explore the art-is-life-and-life-is-art paradigm a bit more, especially when reading of Tracey Emin.

Summary descriptions of those conceptual artworks and humorous narrations of bad behaviors flank sentimental accounts of friends who died and pseudo-philosophical reflections on art, life, and death – both physical and metaphorical.

Muir allowed me to soak into 90s London’s reality. I felt Muir’s uncertainties, disappointments, joys, wittiness and will to take part into the bittersweet symphony (as The Verve once sang) of that irreverently conceptual art.

The fact that Muir was actually there, breathing the rebel attitude of the 90s generation and living beside those same artists that made art question itself, makes this book not only a pleasurable reading but also an important document of those years that witnessed important changes on which “contemporary art” built itself. As Matthew Collings (the Guardian) critically suggests:

Lucky Kunst's ideal audience is young arrivals to art whose minds are still open […] But if you know about the YBA phenomenon already, this book is superfluous, not because it's inaccurate (it isn't), but because it has nothing to add to the existing mythology. It's a work of enthusiasm in which routine droning drowns out lively observation.

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