Stieglitz used a backdrop of The Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. This concern is largely absent in other traditions of art. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art’s role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature. Twenty-five years ago saw the opening of the exhibition Sensation, where Charles Saatchi showed his private collection of Young British Art Newsists , at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Here we delve into The Art Newspaper’s archive to explore…