GREGOR MUIR

These days artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are major celebrities. But Gregor Muir knew them at the start; his unique memoir chronicles the birth of Young British Art. Muir, YBA's 'embedded journalist', happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton before Jay Jopling arrived with his White Cube Gallery, when this was still a semi-derelict landscape of grotty pubs and squats. There he witnessed, amid a whirl of drunkenness, scrapes and riotous hedonism, the coming-together of a remarkable array of young artists - Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, Angus Fairhurst - who went on to produce a fresh, irreverent, often notorious form of art - Hirst's shark, Sarah Lucas's two fried eggs and a kebab. By the time of the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy YBA had changed the art world for ever.

Published to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition of film and video works at Tate Modern, "Time Zones explores questions about the nature of time and the way it is perceived in modern culture. The international selection of artists featured in the book, including Fkret Atay, Yael Bartana, Jeroen de Rijke, Wllem de Rooij, Wolfgang Staehle, and Fiona Tan, all make the passage of time a central feature of their work. Essays by Tate curators Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir offer insights into the individual artists.