In this updated edition of High Art Lite, Julian Stallabrass takes a critical look at the subject of recent British art and its legacy in the twenty-first century. Accessible, timely, and generously illustrated, High Art Lite provides a sustained analysis of the British art scene, exploring the reasons for its popularity and the work of its leading figures.

“I cannot help but endorse his analysis of the high art lite tendency . . . its abject willingness to be fucked up by the 1990s cult of celebrity; fucked over by the 1990s boom in consumerism; fucked sideways by its adoption of the styles and modes of popular culture; and fucked to buggery by its co-option by the new Labourite idiotology.” … Will Self, New Statesman

“Julian Stallabrass, in his Verrine blast against Britart, combines the early Berger’s fierce critique of consumerist contamination with the later Berger’s sense of art’s high purpose.” … Marina Warner, London Review of Books

“A lacerating analysis of the reactionary tendencies of high art lite itself.” — Financial Times

“A withering attack on the avant-garde pretensions of current British art.” …
Brian Appleyard, The Sunday Times

Julian Stallabrass is a writer and art critic. He lectures in art history as the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He is author of Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (Verso) and the co-editor of Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art.

“A full-throated attack on the “new British art,” a movement obsessed with commerce and cults of the personal, that manages to be smarter and more far-reaching than its hyped/hopped-up subject ... Nimbly written and bolstered by a constellation of critical and cultural referents: balanced, engrossing, historically framed examination of this latest avant-garde, so startling yet so oddly familiar.” … Kirkus Reviews

“He asks the questions that people would like addressed, and gives thoughtful and provocative answers. What is the real worth of these artifacts?” … Richard Gott, The Independent

Praise for Stallabrass's previous book, Gargantua:

“One of the UK's pre-eminent Marxist critics (and critic of Marxism).” — Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism

“Stallabrass is no darling of the powerful neo-conservative faction of the mass culture he so astutely skewers [he] raises an eloquent voice against the deliberate social amnesia emblematic of so many projects within mass culture.” — Toronto Globe and Mail

 

 
Publication
Cloth: July 1999
Paper: November 2002
(new edition)

352 pages
53 colour and b/w illustrations

Cloth
1 85984 721 8
US$25 / £20 / CAN$35

Paper
1 85984 436 7
US$17 / £13 / CAN$25