"An Architect in London" is the title Hadid chose for her contribution to the catalogue of the British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age exhibition, on view through 12 August at the Victoria and Albert Museum, an institution that — if there was ever the need — is yet again showing it is a guarantee of quality and more capable than most at mixing high and low, exploration and popularisation, creating entertaining exhibitions that you leave knowing more than you did when you arrived.
London has waited 64 years to host the Olympics again but no one can accuse it of being idle in the meantime. Many of the ideas that have emerged in and around London in the six decades bookended by two Olympic Games are paraded in British Design 1948-2012, the best and most inclusive cross-section of the many exhibitions being held in the city to celebrate British production and its icons: from the robes and crown worn by Elizabeth II for her coronation, to David Bowie's equally flamboyant stage costumes from his Ziggy Stardust days; from the stylised silhouette of Concorde, to the hyper-realistic contours of Allen Jones' sado-masochistic chair and so on, to Mary Quant, i-D, Peter Saville and Blur… If I had to choose just one thing to express London's coolness, I would opt for its famous Underground logo, designed in 1913!
In London, style is a mix of the sophisticated and the unconventional. It is born in the street and spreads out from there through all the strata of a British society that is both class-conscious and permeable. The street — in the sense of a public thoroughfare and a place of origin — was evoked in the title of Damien Hirst's autobiography On the way to work, published in 2001. In it, the leader of the Young British Artists (YBA) adopts a salaciously funny tone to describe his journey towards planetary success, driven by a tremendous desire for social retribution and genuine talent. For some years now, much of the art world has dismissed him as an ultra-commercial artist, but Hirst has produced unforgettable images and, indeed, there are lengthy queues for his first retrospective — on view through 9 September at the Tate Modern. Those up for the wait are rewarded with the aesthetic and emotional impact of works such as a room full of butterflies that live and die before the visitors' eyes, appearing to alight fleetingly on his first monochrome paintings; the spin and spot paintings; the shark in formaldehyde restored for the occasion. His latest works seem to parody the above; kitsch merchandise waiting to be purchased by your everyday (neo)-collector that doesn't even scratch the surface of the greatness of previous Hirst visions and their ability to impact on the collective imagination. Someone once said that — with the exception of Picasso and few others — an artist has ten years of intense and significant production. Hirst's decade was definitely the Nineties when, as he says, "In London would seem like a time when all it was easy and like a party". Times have changed. Today, the Whitechapel Gallery bookshop is selling his On the way to work at half price and the Tate shop has deck chairs personalised with his butterflies for around a hundred pounds, with T-shirts of his diamond-encrusted skull going for much less.
There are no British talents in the museums and galleries with the ability to galvanise the world's attention as Hirst and his group did 20 years ago. Apart from the Hayward Gallery which, immediately before the Olympic Games, focused on the post-YBA generation comprising David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller (the latter recently chosen to represent Great Britain at the forthcoming Venice Art Biennale), the only institution that makes any attempt to scout for new talent is the Whitechapel Gallery. Its The London Open exhibition, on until 14 September, showcases 35 artists active on the London scene, describing them as the potential stars of the future. Equally, it is taking no chances by unveiling a permanent frieze by the super-established Rachel Whiteread on the gallery's façade. It also allocated the less prestigious spring slot to the great but unsettling Gillian Wearing, who painted a far from festive picture of the English Nineties.
Figures such as Tracey Emin have been roped in to try and draw the hordes of visitors outside town during the Olympic fortnight — an attempt made by Turner Contemporary in Kent. In the classics sector, David Hockney — busier than ever at 75-plus — had his celebration at the Royal Academy in the first half of the year. At roughly the same time, the late Lucien Freud — the best-known British artist on the planet after Francis Bacon — featured at the National Portrait Gallery, before making way for portraits of the Queen just in time for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Under the gaze of the doyens of Brit Art, alive and dead, that draw crowds to museums like supermarkets on Saturday afternoons, the former YBAs (Hirst, Whiteread, Emin…) are served up to the millions of foreign visitors in transit through the city as icons of that Cool Britannia that can never be recreated but only evoked with a sweet sense of nostalgia.
These are no longer the times of the scandalous gestures of the YBAs, who filled the front pages of the newspapers by turning contemporary art into a social phenomenon as popular as music and fashion. The energy is anything but depleted in this city that respects tradition but plans innovation. You only have to walk through the streets of Shoreditch on a Saturday afternoon with another national icon, Dinos Chapman — half of the notorious Chapman brothers duo — to rediscover that mixed urban fabric described by Zaha Hadid more than two decades ago and to sense fresh ferment brewing in a whole host of spaces that are difficult to classify — bars, fashion stores, independent exhibition spaces and often all three together. Because, more than ever today, what really matters is being there. Caroline Corbetta