YBA

See also: yba

English

Alternative forms

• yBa

Noun

YBA (plural YBAs)

1. Initialism of Young British Artist.
   • 2001, Alistair Hicks, Mary Findlay, Friedhelm Hütte, Art works: British and German contemporary art 1960-2000, page 149:

     Clarity of purpose was never a YBA trademark, yet the only serious challenge to Hirst's leadership has come from someone who expresses her incoherence rather more lucidly than Hirst.

   • 2002, Kent Logan, The Logan Collection, page 15:

     Interestingly, the first work by a YBA (Young British Artist) to enter the collection was purchased from d'Offay […]

   • 2011 July 10, Ben Lewis, The Observer:

     The YBAs created a new and accessible fusion of pop and conceptualism that had the distinctively British feel of an indie band.

   • 2015, Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, Penguin, published 2016, page 110:

     To their critics, the YBAs, with their emphasis on sex, sensationalism and shock tactics, were doing little more than copying the tactics of the ad agencies.

   • 2024 April 17, Charlotte Edwardes, “‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     The gold rush had begun with the YBAs in the 90s and was driven by cash from the former Soviet Union, the dotcom boom, the explosion in PR know-how, and opportunistic collectors such as Charles Saatchi.

   • 2024 May 29, Simon Hattenstone, quoting Tracey Emin, “The radical, ravishing rebirth of Tracey Emin: ‘I didn’t want to die as some mediocre YBA’”, in The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN:

     And the biggest thing was I didn’t want to die being some mediocre YBA artist from the 90s. I thought: that’s not me. What have I been doing?

Anagrams

• aby, bya, Aby, bay, Bay, yab, ABY