Michael Craig-Martin’s magical secret to being a great artist – and how he inspired a generation of YBAs

Michael Craig-Martin looks out from his 21st-storey apartment in the Barbican, the immense London sprawl spread out before him. “And it’s as though everything I’ve ever worked on or thought about is coming together now.” For all his presence on the London art scene over nearly half a century, from youthful interloper to distinguished elder statesman – a Royal Academician indeed – Craig-Martin was a late developer in terms of creating an immediately identifiable style. “So it’s interesting to me that my career high is coming now, with an exhibition of work mostly produced very recently, if not right now.” open image in gallery Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts There are interviews that feel daunting because the subject has a reputation for being surly, incoherent or simply shy. “As a way of talking about very complex things in language that anyone can understand, and which undermines pomposity and mystification, humour is really a no brainer.” I put it to him that his contribution to the YBA movement, many of whose key members he tutored at London’s Goldsmiths College in the 1980s, including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, was to give these feisty young artists permission to manipulate the structures of the art world using the language and imagery of their own generation and social background. If Craig-Martin’s failure to build on his Seventies success with An Oak Tree – to create a “body of work” around that seminal piece – had frustrated him at the time, it proved a retrospective blessing as his name and reputation weren’t fixed in a particular historical era.