If the bulk of London's Japan 2001 Festival revisits traditions past and present, "JAM: London Tokyo" at the Barbican Gallery was designed to predict the future.
The first JAM exhibition in 1996 was a snapshot of Cool Britannia in the making. Many of the names that would become synonymous with London's identity as an art and design capital were featured. The cool, almost clinical portraits by Rankin (creative director of the youth-culture magazine Dazed and Confused Magazine) were juxtaposed with collections of club-night fliers. The cerebral clothing designs of Hussein Chalayan rubbed shoulders with sardonic, street-fashion labels.
By introducing youth culture -- at its freshest and most mercurial -- into a gallery space, organizers upended notions about what was worthy of artistic consideration and foreshadowed the increasingly blurry boundaries between fine art and commodity.