Bloomsbury set

I enjoyed this article about the Bloomsbury set.  I thought Zoe Williams wrote an excellent piece, particularly in her contrast between the Bloomsbury group and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.  

"Contrast the YBAs, the Young British Artists of the nineties, who had as much noise around them – perhaps not as much shagging, certainly as much of a feeling of a gilded clique, but rather an empty set of founding principles: that meaning was dead, craft was dead, purity was dead, business was inseparable from art and money was indivisible from worth. It had a certain internal coherence, and it made perfect sense within the age, shot with postmodernism, and – in the nonsensical framing of the day – post-irony; but we can already see that it had no legacy. Nobody will be talking about Damien Hirst in 2050 (my note: not sure if Zoe W is right here).

and the ideals of Bloomsbury

"From Virginia Woolf, they had the urgent duty of honesty, the truthfulness of having fully explored one’s own mind, rather than the more reputable, less interesting version of not telling lies. From Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, they had the concept of applied art, so that there needed to be no distinction between high art, design, philosophy, poetry, tablecloths: that living a complete life meant bringing creative intellect to everything."