Gregor Muir – författare

These days artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are major celebrities. But Gregor Muir knew them at the start; his unique memoir chronicles the birth of Young British Art. Muir, YBA’ s ‘ embedded journalist’ , happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton before Jay Jopling arrived with his White Cube Gallery, when this was still a semi-derelict landscape of grotty pubs and squats. There he witnessed, amid a whirl of drunkenness, scrapes and riotous hedonism, the coming-together of a remarkable array of young artists – Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, Angus Fairhurst - who went on to produce a fresh, irreverent, often notorious form of art - Hirst’ s shark, Sarah Lucas’ s two fried eggs and a kebab. By the time of the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy YBA had changed the art world for ever.

Exploring his background as a child of an immigrant family, ideas about death and religion and his queer perspective, this radical re-visioning highlights how Warhol's work marked a period of cultural transformation that still resonates today.As an underground art star, Andy Warhol (1928–87) was the antidote to the prevalent abstract expressionist style of 1950s America. He introduced popular everyday subjects into his practice and openly acknowledged the wide-ranging influences on his work. Throughout his career, his forays into advertising, fashion, film, TV and music videos, marked a fascination with mainstream popular culture. This book will position Warhol at the vanguard of artistic experimentation, and reveals him as an artist who both succeeded and failed in equal measure; an artist who embraced the establishment while cavorting with the underground. It further highlights Warhol's knowing flirtation with the commercial world of celebrity alongside his socially engaged collaborations and advocacy of alternative lifestyles. Including his iconic depictions alongside lesser-known works, as well as the installation Silver Clouds, this fascinating book returns Warhol to his conceptual ambition and positions him within the shifting creative and political landscape in which he worked, permitting a broad view of how Warhol, and his work, marked a period of cultural transformation.