Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art - Erstausgabe

Apocalypse accompanies one of the most exciting art events of the year. Concentrating on themes inspired by the coming of the 21st century, this internationally significant exhibition-the successor to the controversial "Sensation" exhibition shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York-will include installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos, many specially created for the exhibition by 15 internationally renowned and controversial artists whose identities are a closely guarded secret.

For the catalogue, the talented young photographer Norbert Schoerner has photographed the artists at work in their studios. Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy and curator of the exhibition, contributes an introduction explaining his personal vision of the arts at this turning point in history. Thought-provoking and authoritative essays on each artist have been provided by leading art writers. Sure to attract international attention, Apocalypse is an essential purchase for anyone interested in contemporary art.

NORMAN ROSENTHAL is exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts.

NORBERT SCHOERNER is a London-based photographer whose photographs have appeared in major fashion magazines.

MICHAEL ARCHER is a contributor to Art Monthly and ArtForum, and a lecturer at Chelsea College of Art & Design and Goldsmiths' College, London.

JAMES HALL is a contributor to ArtForum and the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the author of The World of Sculpture.

NATHAN KERNAN is a frequent contributor to Modern Painters and The Burlington Magazine.

200 illustrations in full color, 11 x 115/8", The horror, the horror. Three years after Royal Academy Exhibition Secretary Norman Rosenthal organized the controversial "Sensation" exhibit comes the sequel, "Apocalypse." It takes as its philosophical starting point the Book of Revelation, though the subtitle exposes a compromising catch-all: "Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art." The kitsch creations of Jeff Koons and Mariko Mori and the casual photography of Wolfgang Tillmans provide superficial beauty, while the most obvious horror is Hell, Jake and Dinos Chapman's truly apocalyptic sculpture comprising nine glass cases arranged in a swastika, containing 5,000 figurines of Nazis and their torturers indulging in unspeakable sadism. This Goyaesque vision of eternal return is the centerpiece of the exhibition, and rightly so. Collector Charles Saatchi's money was well spent. But, apart from the brutally understated paintings of Luc Tuymans, Rosenthal's evangelical vision creates an art theme park, from Gregor Schneider's claustrophobic cellarage, "a cathedral of erotic misery," or, more prosaically, a fairground haunted house through which one clambers, to Mori's dream machine and Darren Almond's Auschwitz bus stops. After such one-trick ponies, Maurizio Cattelan's blackly comic fallen pope, struck by a meteorite, proves welcome. Alive or dead, infallible or found out, the rich ambiguity goes to the crux of belief.

Rosenthal's attractive catalog for these memento mori from his 13 international Cassandras lends the exhibition invaluable context and strategy, especially given the apologia passing for notes on the gallery walls. Alongside a CV are photographs of other works by each artist, followed by stills of their apocalyptic exhibit. This can have a strange effect: Schneider's assemblage suddenly appears cinematic, while the films of Chris Cunningham (of Björk and Aphex Twin video fame) and Mike Kelley become necessarily photographic. And there is a typically overblown introductory essay by Rosenthal, which justifies his idiosyncratic curatorial conceit. Intended as a bifocal survey incorporating history and the postmillennial present, "Apocalypse" proves not so much a sensation as a curate's egg. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk