Martin Maloney & Die Young Stay Pretty (1998)

Art Design Publicity 3(2) - Totally Walker | Published 14 August 2011
Page 4 of 9

According to Martin Maloney, the “dreamy qualities in the artworks” he had selected stemmed not from “a personal poetic” but from “the commercial exploitation of our desire for that poetic”; they evinced “the blank beauty of a generation seduced by the romantic poses of people, places and things from TV and magazines”.

Martin Maloney (nicknamed “Baloney” by the magazine Art Review) was born in London in 1961 and trained at a number of art colleges, including Goldsmiths’, over a long period (1980-93). During the mid-1990s, he organised a series of group shows in Brixton at Lost in Space, a “gallery” which was actually his own flat. These shows gained him public attention and commissions.

Important influences in his own artistic development and that of other British artists were shows of American art, such as True Stories and Bad Girls (ICA, 1992, 1993), which introduced the new American “teen art” of John Currin, Karen Kilimnik, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Jim Shaw, Jack Pierson and Sue Williams. Maloney was encouraged by this work to try his hand at figurative, narrative art. In his view, British artists “can look at things around the world and they can make a British Art version”, therefore, ’“the conservative streak of British art and British culture can be put to good use, and be a strength not a weakness. That is what makes it radical. It’s not a culture that invents new art forms, it refines them ... American art kicks the ball, and British artists grab it.”[5]

Because Martin Maloney was multi-skilled— curator, teacher, writer, painter— and Charles Saatchi’s friend (but he denied advising Saatchi or “shopping” for him), he exercised considerable influence in the London art world. Overnight, it seemed, he replaced Damien Hirst as the brash bad boy of BritArt.

Adrian Searle, The Guardian’s critic, responded to the Die young stay pretty and Dumbpop Jerwood Gallery, (1998) shows by dismissing most of the exhibits as’“visual Valium” and by declaring that BritArt had “lost its brain”.[6] In 1999 the alleged “dumbing down” of culture in Britain became a matter of general public concern; for some this was also a problem in the art world.

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