Co-founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish (who left the movement in 2001), Stuckism challenges the accepted wisdom of the art establishment: that contemporary art should be defined by what the YBAs produced, and what conceptual artists continue to produce.

While often represented as wanting to limit the definitions of what art is - an accusation not without foundation, seeing as their vitriolic and passionate manifestos contain statements such as “Those who do not paint are not artists” - they actually want the definition of art to be expanded. Expanded to include painting. Figurative painting in particular.

But why should they feel the need to make such a demand? Surely, art is about painting? Our galleries are full of paintings. What’s their problem?

To answer this, they would point to the 2002 Turner Prize short-list. Not one painter was selected to go forward to be in the running for the most prestigious contemporary art prize in the country. Unless painting in elephant dung counts. This point is for them, not only hugely ironic considering Turner’s status as a painter, but is also worrying for them as representatives of a movement dedicated to figurative realism.

When The Shark itself was put on show at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, the Stuckists challenged the very notion that pickled shark was art. They obtained a shark that had been on display in the window of an electrician’s shop since 1989. And how much is that sharky in the window? To rival Saatchi’s Shark, they put it on display in their own gallery with a £1m price tag.

Charles Thomson gave his reasoning behind this to 24 Hour Museum:

If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie’s, which was on display two years before hand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn’t art at all?

For the Stuckists, this parallel world of art and non-art is created by its context. If something is put arbitrarily in a gallery then it becomes art, rather than it having merit in itself. Similarly, this means that anything can be art if in the right place.

They may have a point. During the judging of the 1993 Turner Prize, three judges cogitated in front of Bel Littlejohn’s piece, I Want To Die Now, Alone And Mouldy, Hating Everyone, Always And Forever, which consisted of lots of dead hamsters in a big wheel and, it seemed, a pile of vomit. They agreed that this was truly a brave and bold piece of art. Unfortunately, the integral vomit had not been the product of the artist’s mind but of a poor visitor’s stomach produced on viewing Littlejohn’s dead hamsters. Although the visitor had been cleared out, there had not been time to clear up the sick before the judges arrived.

The term Stuckist was adopted by Thompson after Tracey Emin, then partner of Billy Childish, told him in relation to his art, “You’re stuck! Stuck, stuck, stuck!”

Like Fauvism and Primitivism before it, the insult stuck and named a new movement. The real intent of the Stuckists, however, is not to make a new way, but to bring the ideas behind Modernism back into the sites and sights of the art world, and the public art world in particular – a world they would claim has become mired in a soulless, post-modern miasma where nothing is true, the world is big and full of stuff, and anything can be art. Including a dead shark.

This criticism is not solely aimed at what has occurred in the art world since 1988 and the opening of Freeze. They see the beginning of conceptual art taking over the acquisition policy of museums and galleries as dating from the 1970s. In 1972, The Tate purchased Equivalent VIII (Carl Andre, 1966). This possibly marks the most well-known and sensational initial purchase of conceptual art by a public gallery in England. It is more commonly known as the Pile of Bricks.

The focus of much of their wrath is Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and, until 2007, chair of the panel who chooses the shortlists and winners of the Turner Prize. One of the visitors to Freeze, Serota has since been the champion of many a YBA, by placing their work in the Tate permanent collection. Having overseen the opening of Tate Modern to house contemporary art, he said (when the Tate was given works by Hirst so as to shape the way the gallery represents him):

Tate is indebted to international contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst for working with us on building the collection.

The Stuckists mocked Serota through their 2000 show, The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota, from which Charles Thomson’s Sir Nicholas Serota Makes An Acquisitions Decision has became an icon for the movement. In return, Serota declined the donation of works from the Stuckists’ Punk Victorian show at Liverpool’s Walker gallery during 2004 and 2005. Serota retorted that there was nothing in the show of worth to merit it being held in a national collection.

For the Stuckists, Serota holds an iron grip on what is purchased with public funding and charity from the contemporary art world, to define our national collections. This criticism has even been backed by a Stuckist Downing Street petition calling for the Prime Minister to remove Serota from this post.

The Stuckists are of course not the only people to hold the opinion that the contemporary art world is going down the drain as if in some kind of plumbing-based installation. Their outrage at the 2002 Turner Prize shortlist was echoed by then junior culture minister, Dr Kim Howell, who said:

If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.

Similarly, the very man who ignited the whole YBA thing, with his commissioning of Shark and other conceptual pieces upon which he based his gallery collection and made a fortune, now seems to have changed his tune. In 2003, with he and Hirst apparently at odds with each other over how Hirst’s work was displayed in the County Hall Gallery, Saatchi sold up and moved on.

Initially, this was just in terms of his collection. The YBA conceptual art was packed up and sent away on tour. This turned out to be a bit of a problem, however. Much of it was in storage in a Leytonstone warehouse when it went up in flames on May 24 2004. Inside was an estimated £50m worth of art, over 100 of the pieces produced by the YBAs and owned by Saatchi.

Despite his expressed sadness at the loss, Saatchi’s County Hall Gallery walls were soon filled with paintings on the premise that:

The Gallery believes that throughout a period when photography, video and installation art has been at the forefront of museum attention, painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate.

Entitled The Triumph of Painting, this 2005 exhibition began what was to be a redefinition of what is now to fill the new Saatchi Gallery in the Duke of York’s HQ in Chelsea, where his collection moved on October 9 2008. The aim is to bring contemporary art to a wider audience and that, it seems, means broadening the definition of what new art is in the 21st century, with the promise that the galleries will not only be free but filled with painting and sculpture as well as installations.

Subtitled The London Contemporary Art Gallery, it is clearly aiming to rival Tate Modern, with both the scale of its building and its attempt to provide cultural navigation - navigation which seems to steer the art world away from, and move towards, a critique of the very movement Saatchi’s money and intervention began back in the 1990s.