The artists themselves are curiously mute about their practice, perhaps because there is little to say about works that specialise in stating the bleeding obvious. Art is a commodity in the marketplace, women have a raw deal, children's sexuality is spooky, we are all going to die, etc. The authority of the gallery created a magical hiatus where pandering to the audience's appetite for sensation and vulgarity is seen in the guise of importance. However, nothing worthwhile can live long within inverted commas. Far from being subversive, this work is subservient to the institutions validating power.
Artistic practice is the most critical practice.
Art works should engage, articulate, problematise, open new ways of seeing, place the viewer in jeopardy of their received opinions, move the artists to the limits of what they know or believe, excite, incite, entertain, annoy, get under the skin, and when you've done with them, nag at your mind to go take another look. At many art colleges, art history has been replaced as a mandatory part of fine-art courses by critical theory. An academy, an orthodoxy, a training scheme for artists has been created and, as in Mannerist paintings, gestures have lost their connectedness with meaning in the same way that sentiment comes apart from emotion. This, nevertheless was the path chosen by the students of the Freeze generation. Freeze was the show in which student work broke through.