'Everyone is an artist,' Joseph Beuys famously declared, but perhaps he should have added that not everyone should necessarily exhibit their work. Andrew Graham-Dixon on the 'BT New Contemporaries', Manchester

STUART MORGAN, one of the three selectors responsible for choosing this year's ''New Contemporaries'', makes it clear that they have had to be rather more rigorous than they would have liked. ''We should have said yes to them all,'' he writes in the catalogue, ''the man in Brighton who filmed his birthday party; the table with turnips rammed through it; the prolonged video close-up of the artist's vagina; the urinal carved out of soap . . .'' As it is, they felt compelled to restrict the show only to works of demonstrable, proven quality.
 
Room had to be found for Chris Ofili's large abstract paintings plastered with real elephant turds, and for Simon Starling's photograph of an obscure object described by its title as the blue plaster cast of the bottom teeth of Frank Gilsen made on the 5th of May 1992 and found on the 10th May 1992 in the grounds of the Museum Hans Ester, Krefeld. It would have been nice to include one or two eccentricities just for the hell of it - but standards have to be kept up, after all.
 
The exhibition was devised to introduce the best work by the most promising young British artists. It was called ''Young Contemporaries'' and it was opened for the first time in 1947 by the Queen (now the Queen Mother) who stayed to have a look round and was so impressed or so polite that she bought two paintings. Times change. Hard, really, to imagine her buying anything from the ''BT New Contemporaries 1993'' which opened on Saturday at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. Certainly not...

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