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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

The Turner Prize

Fengs for the Memory

12:33 / 09.04.02

"The Turner Prize, Im afraid has decayed into a total discrace. It's a soggy, flaccid. in-group excercise in an art world that has run out of steam. Your'e given a tour of hell. If your'e presenting Emin as a great feminist, you can here the wooden paddle scrape on the bottom of the barel" - Robert Hughes (from the Guardian).

Is the Turner Prize worthwhile. Would art have died on it's arse in this country had Channel 4 not taken over and turned it into a full scale media event?

pointless and uncalled for

12:52 / 09.04.02

Wouldn't have died, would have found a different outlet. Never underestimate the life of art.

@ Bod (The Second)

14:00 / 09.04.02

Isn't the Turner Prize the art equivalent of the Smash Hits Music Awards?

14:05 / 09.04.02

maybe it wouldn't have died, but would the general public know about it? Whatever is said about the quality of work that came out of the brit-pack artists and whatever you may think of the quasi-stuckist style reporting of the turner prize in the mainstream press the prize and the media circus that surrounds it at least brought the work of young artists to the attention to an audience that would never have known about it otherwise...

09:09 / 10.04.02

The stated aim of the Turner Prize is to promote public discussion of contemporary art, which it certainly does. It's not always necessarily about quality (I'm not saying they don't think the artists they pick are good), it also functions as a barometer of current debate and trends. For example, in 2001 there was a lot of talk about the resurgence of painting, in terms of painting expanding its vocabulary and other image based media appropriating the forms of painting. So you had a shortlist that included two painters, Michael Raedecker who used embroidery and collage (also picking up on the burgeoning handmade aesthetic), Glenn Brown who had a witty take on the history of painting and process painting/the use of paint as a physical substance, and the prize was given to a photographer with a very 'painterly' vocabulary.

I do wonder though, is the discussion promoted by the Turner Prize that useful? It's easy to say that the Stuckist type reaction is the result of a banal tabloid mentality, but should there be a responsibility on the part of the organisations involved in the prize to facilitate accesibility, or at least create a greater understanding of the shortlisted work? If the debate created generally results in reinforcing the stereotypes that modern art is irrelevant nonsense (from the tabloid viewpoint), or that the general public are unwilling to seriously consider anything that doesn't look like a nice Monet (from the fine art viewpoint), maybe we're better off without it.

10:45 / 10.04.02

Quite off topic, but ...are the tabloids really the place to be looking to for any kind of meaningful debate ?
Isn't the best we can hope for their coverage of the arts is to mention it and get the names of the artists right? or am i being overly pessimistic here?

07:27 / 11.04.02

Probably not. I think I was conflating "general public" with "tabloid viewpoint", which is as unhelpfully stereotypical as the type of simplistic debate I mentioned at the end of my last point.

And it's all good spectacle, isn't? The Stuckists flashing torches in protest against Martin Creed made for a pretty funny situation, and it's not hard to find out about either side's work and ideas if your interested. Which you're not going to be if you've never heard about it.

19:34 / 11.04.02

art to the general public is a waste of time. if the Turner prize is being used to promote it then it's a waste of time. no one gives a toss. except people like Madonna who want to seem trendy. art is useless. and that comes from an artist. it brings no change and hardly any entertainment.
i feel sad

what is the point? there ain't one.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:52 / 05.12.07

I went to the Turner Retrospective at the Tate last week, I suppose that, because it was the first exhibition of it's type that I've been to, when it's a collection of modern work by different people, I was surprised by how I swung wildly between 'this is brilliant' and 'this is shit', Anish Kapoor's huge blue bowls I really liked, Hirst's bisected cow I liked, though walking between the two halves made me feel uneasy, the film stuff I didn't enjoy (far too long and tedious) and the empty room with the flickering light? Arse. Grayson Perry's pots and ShedBoatShed I liked more 'in person' than I had seeing them in pictures.

09:56 / 14.01.08

A lady said: “I went to the Turner Retrospective at the Tate last week”
So did I. What struck me was how much the show was about the Turner Prize itself rather than the art that had featured in it. For each year they gleefully reported what the Tabloids (or other press) had had to say about the prize and the blurbs seemed more concerned with that than meaningful exposition of the featured works or artists.
The other thing that struck me was how the prize didn’t really seem to know what it wanted to be. The overview showed how the short lists seemed to flail around, sometimes deliberately courting controversy, sometimes appearing to pick things especially to avoid that, sometimes all painters, sometimes all men/women, sometimes all different media. In each case I was left with the impression that the lists had been conceived with more than half an eye on what the press would think of them and that the choices seemed reactive rather than in any sense brave or even chosen with what surely ought to be the only criteria – “is it any good?” – in mind.
I liked Anish Kapoor’s bowls best as well for what it’s worth.

Bod said: “Isn't the Turner Prize the art equivalent of the Smash Hits Music Awards?”
I reckon it is yeah, or the Oscars, in as much as there is no way that you could think that that overview showed the very best of (loosely) British art from the last twenty years or so. In fact I think we made those exact comparisons when we went. However I’ve got more sympathy for the Turner Prize as pop music and films don’t need nearly so much help to penetrate the public consciousness as art – though of course, whether that penetration is a worthwhile aim is a different debate (on the whole I think it is).