Young pretenders stage Renaissance

Old tricks, new dogs.

Ever since Damien Hirst et al catapulted themselves to fame with a DIY exhibition in a disused Docklands warehouse to which they dragged the great and the good of the London art scene, young art students and graduates have been trying to pull off the same stunt. This time it's the turn of six recent graduates from Goldsmiths and Middlesex who have taken over Hoxton House, a rough-and-ready space just off Hoxton Square, and put on the rather ambitiously titled exhibition, Renaissance. Suitably outrageous outbursts have followed in which the group have turned on their venerable predecessors with viciousness that would have made Darwin blush. The group has described themselves as much better than the YBAs, has said "It's time to put those tired YBAs to grass" and redubbed the YBAs, the OBAs (Old British Artists). Has Help the Aged been informed of this disgraceful ageism?

Whilst the exhibition hardly merits comparison to the pan-European flourishing of arts and sciences between the 14th and 17th centuries that it's title invokes, it does deserve a degree of recognition.

Not only has the group succeeded in generating media attention by claiming, in the best tradition of self-fulfilling prophecies, that they were entitled to it in the first place, but they have also put on a highly polished, self-financed show. Of greater interest, however, is the fact that despite their rhetoric, all of the artists work in pure, unadulterated YBA-style.

Their work is bright, well-finished, highly collectable, highly accessible, engages with popular culture and has a strong reliance on visual puns. Jeanine Wollard produces a series of well-finished examples - Slice Skates consists of two large knives secured to the bottom of a pair of ice skates, spattered with blood. In another piece she had affixed a large Tabasco label to a small, wall-mounted, red fire extinguisher. Tim Griffin displays an obsession with prosthetics which has led him to attach the base of a roller skate to an artificial leg. Paul Hosking, meanwhile, has applied the brush of pop art to taxidermy, covering a collection of little stuffed animals with eyes, lips and heads cut out from photographs and magazines.

For better or worse, the heart of YBA, it seems, beats on.

Rennaisance, Hoxton House, 34 Hoxton Street, N1. Until 30 June.