No Fun Without U: The Art of Factual Nonsense

by Jeremy Cooper

No FuN Without U chronicles the life and times of Joshua Compston, a pivotal personality in the Shoreditch art scene of the mid-1990s, until his death at the age of 25 in March 1996. An enigmatic figure, his great creative energy was the driving force throughout his life, art his weapon. His lasting success has been to bring together a group of artists now at the forefront of the London art scene, including Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing, Matt Collishaw, Gavin Turk, Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Damien Hurst. Jeremy Cooper creates a narrative of Compston's life and his impact on the lives of those artists around him, and his relation to the wider London art scene of the time. A mass of photographic documentation of artists, events, exhibitions and memorabilia - much of it unpublished elsewhere - illustrates the text. Joshua Compston's work and its strong influence on the contemporary art scene confirms the validity of the position of curator as artist, the role which he occupied to great effect.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2000

About the author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won
the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.