Where are all those brash YBAS when you need them most?

Memory Palace

White Cube, Mason’s Yard, SW1, and Bermondsey Street, SE1

★★★★★

No gallery represented the feel and style of the early-21stcentury art boom to quite such polarising effect as White Cube. For some, Jay Jopling’s gallery is still the ultimate cutting-edge art destination, where the old Etonian gallerist made millions selling the gritty, street-level art of the YBAS to big-moneyed people who never go near a street; for others it represents the arrogant glitziness of contemporary art at its most pernicious.

For its 25th anniversary exhibition, the gallery seems out to shed what’s left of its reputation as the home of Young British Art (Hirst et al having long since departed), using a themed show on the subject of memory, dominated by international heavy-hitters, to project a more mature and serious image.

And they don’t come much heavier than Anselm Kiefer, whose feel for the darker resonances of German history makes him a natural for a show on memory. The sheer megalomaniac exuberance of his two works creates an invigorating impact as you enter Mason’s Yard. The colossal glass vitrine filled with lead wheelchairs, and the densely worked landscape smothered in molten lead, exude a quality that is patently missing from so much contemporary art: passion.

There’s a vast diversity of work at the larger Bermondsey Street gallery, from fugitive imprints of the artist’s body by veteran African-american artist David Hammons to a large balsa-wood aeroplane by Damián Ortega.

Rather than animating this disparate array of work in a way that resonates with the past (as you’d expect), while projecting into the future (as you might hope), the stolidly academic wall texts impose a peculiar inertness on the proceedings. On this showing at least, White Cube has gone from promoting art that screams its relevance to the world of “now”, to art that has got stuck in an ongoing present in which everything is quite interesting, but nothing is hugely compelling.