As a young artist recently out of undergraduate art school in London, my first reaction to the work of Art Club 2000 in the early nineties was peremptory and hostile. I remember, surprisingly clearly, muttering 'wankers' under my breath before turning the page on the spread of their signature Gap photos that appeared in Artforum. Of all the images of the members of Art Club 2000 dressed in Gap clothing - in a library, in Times Square, on a rooftop, outside a fast-food joint - I think it was the limpid lollygagging in the image of them inside the Conran shop that irritated me most, seeming so slight and vacuous compared to the angry, sarcastic golf-zombies that the London group BANK was producing at the same time. When I turned the page, it was with conviction - a 'forever' sort of thing.

Now, in agreeing (enthusiastically) to write about them fifteen years later, the conventions of wedding speech writing would seem to apply: after the initial provocative remark of dissent the speaker proceeds to reveal how the years and greater familiarity with the subject have led him or her to reject the first mistaken impression for a more sturdy sort of truth. While at weddings the formula is principally a way of getting laughs, a similar method is often present in art criticism, suggesting that the critic often shares with the wedding speaker the design of sneaking in his or her courageous honesty or clever guile under the cloak of a description of the rich complexity of the subject.

This essay was headed that way, but early drafts were impoverished by my attempts to disavow