It is half past nine on a hot summer's night and around 200 people in the seminar room of the Institute of Contemporary Art are showing signs of frustration. The occasion is the latest in a series of panel discussions at the ICA, which have been given the collective title ''Talking Art''. Tonight's guests are three young artists, and the audience is frustrated because, for the past two hours, the panellists have been doing anything but talk art.

Damien Hurst, whose latest work features skinned cow's heads and live flies in sealed glass containers, seems mystified by the event and responds to most of the questions directed at him with defensive sullen-ness. Fiona Rae, a painter, has remained almost entirely silent during the course of the discussion. Simon Linke, the most senior artist of the three, refuses to discuss his paintings because he believes his work should be allowed to speak for itself. He is right, of course, but the audience, shuffling out for the the eve-ning's consolation prize - ICA sherry and peanuts - feels understandably aggrieved.

The ICA seminar may have been a waste of time but it was not without significance. The artists had been invited because they were all successful graduates of Goldsmiths' School of Art - and, as such, part of one of the more intriguing developments in British art now. Goldsmiths' is widely regarded as the happening place in British art education. In recent years its alumni have enjoyed a level of attention, from international dealers, critics and collectors, traditionally reserved - in the British art world at least - for artists at least twice their age.

Post-war British art history could be written as the history of the rise and decline of certain key art schools: the Royal College in the late 1950s...

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