Shock of the New : Royal Academy of Arts’ ‘Sensation’ has drawn public outrage and created internal crises.

There could hardly be more disparate icons of contemporary Britain than serial child murderer Myra Hindley and the august Royal Academy of Arts. But now, Hindley’s mug shot, reworked in acrylic as a 9-by-11-foot monochromatic portrait made from the template of a child’s handprint, shouts from a new academy exhibition--and from national headlines about it.

The furor is about art but may be as much about evolving self-perception in a nation grappling with dramatic change.

The academy show, which has been drawing more than 3,000 visitors daily, is called “Sensation.”

Critics say “Scandal” would have been more apt.

Four of 80 distinguished academicians, artists all, have quit amid loud public protest and internal crisis at the academy, a bastion of British tradition and arbiter of conservative, establishment taste.

“It is criminal and it is disgusting. . . . If I had my way I would rip it down,” said Winnie Johnson, 64, whose son Keith was one of Hindley’s victims 33 years ago.

Instead, protesters hurling eggs and ink defaced the Hindley picture by artist Marcus Harvey, 34. It has been restored and put back on display.

But the academy exhibition of often shocking works by young British artists is drawing unabated fire from critics and public alike.

“What is so new about the art in ‘Sensation’?” curator Norman Rosenthal asks rhetorically. “The answer lies in the generation of artists’ totally new and radical attitude to realism, or rather to reality and real life itself.”

Like the representation of Hindley, imprisoned for life for a 1960s murder rampage, the 110 works by 42 artists, all from the private collection of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, are meant to shock. It includes depictions of dismembered torsos, mutated children, limbless sex dolls, intimate pictures of a drunken slum couple taken by their son.

Tracey Emin displays a pup tent, walls festooned with pictures of “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995.” Marc Quinn’s cast of his head, called “Self,” comes with refrigeration equipment that is filled with eight pints of the artist’s blood inside a cube. Tim Hilton in the Independent newspaper on Sunday called the show “ironic, Postmodern and heartless.”

Damien Hirst, the biggest name, is as ever, effervescent in formaldehyde: tanks displaying a 14-foot tiger shark, a lamb, walk-between slices of cows, a pig sliced longways and displayed in side-by-side cases that move together and apart. It is called “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.”

Critic Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph newspaper asks, “How do you make critical judgments about works of art that deliberately transgress boundaries both of good taste and traditional artistic practice?”

One answer: look beyond the art. That’s what struck feminist author Germaine Greer as she walked through the show. She found a unifying theme in most artists’ immediate, uncompromising confrontation.

“It is art of a consumerist culture that finds nothing worth waiting for, and no pleasure in anticipation,” said Greer in the Financial Times. “What you see is what you get--wham, without a bam, or a ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ ”

David Gordon, manager of the academy, agrees. He says the works by artists in their 20s and 30s who already cast an international shadow speak as much about the new Britain as they do about the art itself. “These artists are Margaret Thatcher’s children,” he said in an interview. “Across nearly 20 years, Thatcherism built a very individualist-based society that demands you make some sort of an impact. This is the artists’ reaction, their way of coping.”

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After decades in which socialist ideals flourished, Thatcherism turned Britain toward a sharp-edged, sink-or-swim entrepreneurial society. Today, state ownership is fading history and remaining pillars of the classical European welfare state are under siege. Railroads, telephones, electric and water companies are all private now and expected to meet shareholder expectations. For the first time, public universities and institutes like the ones many of the artists attended are demanding tuition.

Chris Smith, Britain’s arts minister, said of the event: “ ‘Sensation’ is Britain with attitude. There may be some controversial content, but it demonstrates an enormous amount of creative talent. [It has] the ability to shock, but also to engage peoples’ attention.”

British newspapers say that “Sensation”--which Evening Standard critic Brian Sewell reviles as a “vulgar means of bringing in the hordes to reduce the overdraft”--has brought the staid academy to its greatest crisis since its founding in 1768. The academy is about $3 million in debt, and, if there is dismay over the exhibition among old-line supporters, there is not much reassuring echo from the young rebels. Rejecting an invitation to become a member, Hirst termed the academy “a big, fat, pompous institution.”

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Despite hostility from some academics, professional managers at the academy like Rosenthal or Gordon or “Sensation” co-curator Simonetta Fraquelli are unabashed. “Yes, we are seen as a bastion of classic art in an imposing Victorian building with ‘Royal’ in the title. But that does not stop us from being avant-garde,” Fraquelli said. “Part of our role is to break boundaries.”

Thus, like the Britain it represents and like the artists it is improbably showing, the academy itself is also adapting to new realities. This show “would be controversial anywhere, but people are particularly upset because this is the temple,” Gordon said. “There is a vocal minority that believes we should be a bulwark against what they think is sensationalist, noisy art without merit. We wouldn’t have done the show in this fashion 10 years ago, but we have no reservations today; not the slightest.”

Visitors who fill in questionnaires support the exhibition 3 to 1, says Fraquelli, adding, “It seems to appeal especially to young people raised on TV and computer games.”

Academy director Gordon predicts that, in another 20 years, “Sensation” will be remembered as “one of the most seminal exhibitions of the latter 20th century.”

The exhibition runs until year’s end, when the academy will pause to lick wounds from its visit to a brave--or simply--bizarre new world. Upcoming exhibitions include “Victorian Fairy Painting” and “Art Treasures of England.”

* “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” is at the Royal Academy of Arts until Dec. 28.