He was educated at Leighton Park School and New College, Oxford University where he studied PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics).
Stallabrass was previously a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Stallabrass was highly critical of the Young British Artists movement, and their works and influence were the subject of his 1999 study High Art Lite, a term he coined as a disparaging synonym to the pervasive YBA acronym:"As the art market revived [in the early- to mid- 1990s] and success beckoned, the new art became more evidently two-faced, looking still to the mass media and a broad audience but also to the particular concerns of the narrow world of art-buyers and dealers.
That split in attention, I shall argue, led to a wide public being successfully courted but not seriously addressed.
It has left a large audience for high art lite intrigued but unsatisfied, puzzled at the work's meaning and wanting explanations that are never vouchsafed: the aim of this book is to suggest the direction some of those answers might take and to do so in a style that is as accessible as the art it examines.