Turner Prize

I WILL go and see the turner prize this week.

And maybe you'll check out Owada CDs now if you can find them.

However, the whole thing is more than justified because you can revel in looking at the dozens and dozens of fashion/art scum lapping it up and know in the deepest part of yourself that they have NO SOUL and are the shallowest, most pitiful, pointess motherBLEEPers in history. Hehehe.

No it isn't. No no no. Pissing off "the public" is a bloody STUPID goal! What does it achieve? Is it punXoR? Blind, directionless irritation is exactly that, so you've made a few people in Affluent Commuter Villages go "tccch". Yeah, fabulous, amazing. I could make them go "tcch" by running up behind them and tapping on the back but what would be the POINT? Surely "they think modern art is shite" and this gets reinforced by some boring old twat who of course is ONLY JOKING because he's so much cleverer than the public? It's lazy and to the people who have some reasonable modicum of intelligence and HAF actually seen some Modern Arse which they LIKE is just boring boring boring BORING nyeaaaahaahhhhahahahaha. I don't like the way that this contempt for the "general public" is manifesting itself either. Are you saying, DG, that the general public don't deserve to see "proper" modern art?

here i think is his best work , in that it transforms space , makes you reconsider the mechanics of common and banal objects thru sheer gall.

However that's not to say Creed isn't good. With the lights thing - with lots of his things - he seems to be trying to get as near as possible to not making art. And yes it does make you - or make *us* - ask questions about skill and conceptuality and piss-taking. For instance, "How much skill do you need to make art good?". If the answer is "The more skill the better" then is a forger of a Rembrandt (technically v.difficult) better than Rembrandt? If the answer is "just enough skill" then define enough. And on the other side, very few of the 'it's the concept not the skill, stupid' people have much of a critical grip on what makes a good concept or why a concept has to be had by an Artist before it becomes Art.

The funniest thing on the Turner show was somebody saying that the reason Creed was good was that he "gets up peoples noses". But the person saying that sounded very self-satisfied, so Creed presumably hadn't got up his nose at all (something else might have) - does that mean that Creed is ONLY good as art for people like Sarah C and Mark C who do get annoyed by it, and people like Suzy and I should be disappointed for liking it. But on the other hand it did annoy me a bit with the brazen-ness of it - it put me in touch with my inner philistine for a few seconds, so that was great.

I too get the vague idea that Creed won because it would stimulate the most discussion, and the most annoyed column inches which is what the Turner Prize is pretty much all about. I too like the piece that Antony linked too and think that if it had been in the Tate - he probably wouldn't have won.

Mike Nelson made SUCH a splash in Venice (The Deliverance and the Patience, named after two merchant ships) but the show here at the ICA was disappointing after such a cohesive display. That's why he didn't win.

I'm actually disappointed that Isaac Julien didn't get more comprehension here. He has done a video piece where a black man is wandering Sir John Soane's Museum, which is a jewel box completely subsidised by oppressive colonial exploitation. And in the case of the wandering man, becomes a Pandora's box. There are often diptych screen splits and triptych splits so you can be literalist about that (duality, the fracture of the relationship between the colonised and the booty taken in that process - also with Isaac you're talking about homo booty, so add THAT layer). And his cowboys in the desert are total Tom of Finland, with punk/Westwood refs at no extra charge.

Richard Billingham's work is good, but he is being very lazy making it as most of what's on offer hasn't changed since 1997. That is the year he should have won the Prize.

Also, I'm just a little bit irritated by the people's resentment at having to interpret art for themselves. It's not difficult and you'd resent spoon-feeding anyway, so WTF?

To my mind, this is a more interesting lights on - lights off project. But I will go to the Tate to check it out in person.

Where did someone say this? Also, I remember previously you telling us the background to the Turners (and talking in this post about a lot of background info your average scrote won't know) and saying that knowing all this is certainly part of the interpretation of art. Therefore interpreting art is something you DON'T do yourself if you're going on someones information? I certainly don't have a problem interpreting art for myself, it's when I find that the artist stamps "oh it's actually about the falklands" all over it that I have more issues DAMN YOU NICK HEYWARD!

As for the cowboys, "pure Tom of Finland" they were not - the lean fashionista looks of the actors would have been anathema to muscle- freak ToF!

I think I said this a year ago, but as we know, things get truer with repetition: using the Turner as a guide to contemporary art is like using the Mercury Music prize as your primer for modern music.

That said there really is a terrible flaw in the presentation of the video pieces at the Turner exhibition which didn't give them a fair stab.

Also, Soane of course made his money from architecture, i.e. Immortal High Art (you're the board's staunchest defender of proper payments for artists aren't you Suzy?). If Julien wants us to conflicted about beautiful things coming from badness then there are *tons* of much better places, aren't there?

And you're STILL talking about "the general public" in snobbish terms. Fair enough, they don't know about the Soanes (?) or read any art books - oh hey, hang on, does this mean I am general public as well and should just go and look at a pretty print of some sunflowers in a vase? I believe the Turner could have a lot more potential but as it is it's a dull injoke which generates a lot of smug backpatting which doesn't actually get any good modern art out there at all. Of course I'm talking out of my arse there as this was the first time I heard of Rachel Whiteread'n'that. The Creed thing though was in no way fantastic. Just mediocre, which in turn depresses and angers me, from whence cometh my reaction. And people who say it's great cos they can argue with the "thickies" who don't like, get it, are surely missing some kind of point and using art as a Me Better Than You tool.

EVERYTHING on this board = ART, separately and collectively.

Also so is this: ":P to m.creed and :P to his detractors"

Skill is a TRAP. Theory is a TRAP. Prizes are TRAPS. PunXoR is a TRAP. Ditto freedom, history, the West, the ppl, blair and ART ART ART ART ART ART ART.

The problem seems to be that if Creed's piece is meant to make us think about art it's doing a very bad job of it - as someone said upthread it's making people on both sides reheat fairly typical prejudices. Dull mediocrity encouraging mediocre thinking perhaps? This tempers my earlier happiness a bit - is Creed's installation too near non-art for more exciting conversations about it to happen?

Isabel by the way thought Creed's was easily the best on entirely aesthetic grounds - the regular dimming-to-off and then flooding of the lights have her the nearest of all four to the kind of gut- reaction talked about upthread.

Sure his documentary work shows a film-maker capable of stringing together a vague coherent argument, but his video/film pieces pretty much since YSR are - from a cinematic point of view - rather uninspiring (those I have seen). Perhaps it is only in the field of art that some of the more obvious things he is trying to explore are actually interesting and radical. All too often it is much more informed by Julien the person, for which we can read his sexuality and ethnicity. Once this is known it is very easy to read both surface and depth into his pieces - which would not be there without this knowledge. Being taken seriously by collectors - as you well know - means absolutely nothing.

I'd certainly love to sit down and talk to him about films, but then I could bore the hind leg off a donkey on that subject.

I also think that Sarah's position on this is more than defendable, and for all the excellent presentation of Matthew Collinge, the program did little to dispell this.

It seems to play heavy on your mind that someone, somewhere might condesend to you as a member of the general public. Or it's the anxiety that the people making decisions, awarding prizes, setting cultural agendas might not actually give a shit about the people they're representing or educating or setting up culture intended for everyone to enjoy or to serve as a conversation point. I know people in these positions can be jaded or have entitlement issues, but the vast majority do want something nice to happen as a result of their work. ESPECIALLY artists.

I said upthread that Martin Creed's art is all about equations; it is. There's probably a damned good reason that the light stays off for, say, 4.3 seconds instead of 10. Nobody told me that: I worked it out for myself based on my own reaction to the work I've seen. Bottom-line I don't really care about the predictable traditionalist mouth-frothing at Turner time, it's more expected than most people's rubbish arguments about modern art. Anyway, conceptual artists are not always about the hard-sell, the best ones - like Creed - say very little about the work; you have to take clues from it and interpret it based on what you know. And when I don't know something, instead of grumbling that someone's trying to make an arse of me because I'm just a stupid punter, I make an effort to learn to fill in my gaps. Or you have to accept that jokes are okay in art if it's to be a real mirror for life, and just laugh.

people who get paid for jokes are called comedians, not artists.

Now come on Suzy, this is nonsense. You may well be right that there is a reason 4.3 seconds is used - but it doesn't take a genius to think that there may be a reason behind anything being done in such a deliberate manner. There may be a reason why he did not black out the skylight, there may be a reason why the light flickers on rather than being discrete. But - and this is equally important - there may not. And frankly the four or five sentences put above are about as interesting as the discussion around the Creed piece gets.

Sarah also appreciates there may be a reason - its just it literally does not interest her (sorry Sarah for word mouth implanting). Which is her perogative, when to be fair those books, music, films and TV which you reference are both accessible and more interesting.

Hey! It's No.9 in an occasional series of 'top passive-aggressive statements'

Having thought for myself I pronounce blu-tack on wall = shit, light being turned on and off = shit. It doesn't reach me. I also don't believe that a requirement to research the motivation behind a piece of art = justification for the art per se. If they need to prove themselves through means other than the artwork, then it could be seen, at best, as a visual piece of commentary on the subject, but not art.

I wouldn't for a moment criticise any of you who like these pieces because they emotionally effect you in some way. Only you know whether this is the case or you're faking it, so no criticism would be necessary anyway.

suzy: tell us a BAD piece of art that's been in the turner recently (or is good/bad a trap too?)

originality is a trap: i forgot that one

sarah's and tim's reactions/styles-of-reception to art are the opposites of their attitudes to music: discuss

if I insulted you about the Pixies, I'm sorry: I only recall telling you how and why I thought they were rubbish. That's surely a different thing from your saying the *only* reason contemporary art exists is as a function of scenesterism and snobbery: that necessarily implies that anyone who does happen to enjoy contemporary art is in it for those reasons (champagne, opportunity to patronise others). I really don't think I trail around little galleries in London for that reason, and I also don't go to openings, precisely to avoid what you're talking about.

Scenesterism exists for sure, but is easily avoided. There is a whole lot more to contemporary art than that. Honestly.

I wonder if Suzy timed the Creed pieces lights coming on and off, or if she read that it was a period of 4.3 seconds.

The horse-race thing was a joke mostly and a comment on the prize (which is a pretty bad way to showcase contemporary art, no question). Also, rather crucially, he got it completely wrong.

There is a whole lot more to contemporary art than that. Honestly.

this is so true, which is why the ligging and the backslapping (both of which you have pointed out you do not indulge in!) is so annoying. once again i expressed my opinion badly and was making generalisations (always a bad idea on this board!) it's the whole "let's gang up on people who didn't think it was sooo witty when Madonna said motherfuckers" mentality that is annoying me, coupled with Suzy's assumption that this means i am insecure. i do like a lot of contemporary art, and i should see more, broaden my horizons and that. it's this Turner Prize thing that has really gotten my goat. it's the crumpled up paper and the blu-tack, and the posing. people like you and anthony who just love it and will defend it i really really have no wish to shout at, please believe me.

Mark C: I kind of agree with you in principle, but eagerly await examples of people who've written about loving a piece of art, but have only done so to be cool. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, it's just that, without examples, your righteous scorn appears to be directed towards persons of straw. And why no such scorn for people who write about music which doesn't connect with you?

I'm off to the ICA tonight... to watch some indie pop. Heh.

i like it (er "it": as haven't actually SEEN the creed piece) because it DOESN'T pretend to be deep. I am a Gemini. Deep = evil.

VdR won the Turner Prize at my party by finding a way to adjust my kitchen light so ppl don't bonk their head on it. I won it for spilling oily food all down my T-shirt as per usual and having to go and change into another one. Gareth won for putting cigarette and liquid in a plastic cup in the WRONG ORDER: heat melts plastic, liquid meant to dowse heat runs out of hole and through gaps in flooboard into my downstairs neighbour's ceiling.

WOAH NELLY (tm EMI or someone I should expect), where does this insecurity thing come from? Me having opinions which find problems with how I find art is treated and talked about != me feeling condescended to by the CONCEPT of "art". However I don't like feeling "forced" to check out [xxx] 'background research'. Neither do I like the same thing in music, for example, "she likes B&S therefore she should like Smiths ect accepted canon". It also seems then like the artists aren't saying anything themselves which isn't a reference…

And when I don't know something, instead of grumbling that someone's trying to make an arse of me because I'm just a stupid punter, I make an effort to learn to fill in my gaps.

Now that's uncalled for. I never described, or thought of myself in those terms. But it's good to know what you think, isn't it? Or hang on, am I being 'insecure'? And that wasn't the point I was getting at in the first place. Certainly you've said before that without the background you don't understand it as well. Fair enough, but I don't LIKE having to know a miriad of background information, taking "art" into the purely cereberal realm of The Knowledge which shuns that "gut reaction" talked about upthread.

Rest of what I have to say is expressed by people who got there before I did - sorry, I have dull filing and regular work to do as well! And of course Top Secret Work ahem. The winner of MY Turner Prize today is the horse that lives on the first floor of the building opposite to my office. He's grrr8!

it was one of the things we started to discuss at the Brains Trust table on Sat, but we got bogged down in a defn of modernisn because we are goofy egghedZoR (arose out of eg that old saw: pinefox is a modernist for books but not for pop)

my attitude to nu-art and music is the same: i like it all, all the time (except sometimes); and totally different to my attitude to eg writing (it is all terrible present co.excepted)

Okay, Mark, let's start with bad art in Turner this year: some of the Richard Billingham bits were tosh. I'm thinking of the photographs that were not part of the family series: one of a girl lying on sand, another of some unspecified landscape. They seemed too random. I like to see interconnectivity and a narrative in my art - classic writer business, I'm afraid. Billingham is in a difficult place with his work right now because his work is now part of the mainstream and he has not yet moved on/expanded on that initial spark. I know why: he is scared shitless. He has created something so instantly recognisable and iconic with the 'ray's a laugh' series (a lot of the framing is based on, say, Velasquez paintings) and is now hitting a wall of intimidation and insecurity as his reknown snowballs quicker than he can actually cope with it. He feels accidentally famous, and maybe that's a certain lack of sophistication catching up with him. He is so down-to-Earth as to be tough on himself, so he's going to have trouble for a while, and then pull out of it, because he is a really fantastic artist.

I say this as an *extreme* insider, incidentally: a close friend of mine dated R for almost two years, I've interviewed him twice, I'm not so removed from people who grew up like he did and I've known his gallerist for five years. I've had a lot of opportunity to talk to Richard about his work over the past three years and I came to it because I found his initial shows to be visceral and arresting. My only question - is this a voyeur? - was unequivocally answered NO the first time I read about him.

Mark S, I am really not aiming my "faker" accusations at you or anyone else on this thread (though, as I said earlier, some of you may well be faking it but only yourselves will know), so why the need to launch accusations of insecurity? Apologies to everyone if I've read things wrongly.

You're saying Billingham is something of a one-trick pony then, Suzy?

BTW I thought Madonna saying 'motherfuckers' was totally cheesy, but not half as cheesy as the stuff she said *before* the expletive. And she owns two Kahlos. Bitch.

who cares who wins the grammy or whatever?

Suzy, on the other, has a right to defend her expertise as being knowledge and not prima facie a. self-delusion, b. vacant snobby posturing (esp. as it's manifestly neither).

I'm kind of ambivalent abt the gleeful take- that-fuXoRs response, even though I sort of share it on kneejerk instinct: because I think it renders something a bit inaccessible which actually ought to be clearer. Which is that i. "I could have done that" is, as an expression of hostility and anger, really a rather weird kind of self- hatred, and I wish more of the post- Duchampians would work more on the implications of this (ie more Turner Prizes for everyone everywhere: use it as an energy, not a stick to beat Creed [ie yrself] with); ii. Oh sod, what was ii? Yeah, that I think it's REALLY REALLY rare that the makers themselves are full-on ten-gallon fakers. Yeah, fucked-up manipulative fuckers with complex self-destructive tides sometimes (why hullo johnny rotten you fine musician you), but actually working at someting real they couldn't do or show or explain or energise another way.

Also: "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a hateful little story.

Also also: television is better than art because art makes poor television (but not vice versa obv).

Traps = things you move to to explain the whole megilla which actually remove the purpose of unveiling the megilla in the first place (as opposed to going straight to the traps).

The Emporors New Clothes is only a hateful story if you are telling it from the Emp's P.O.V. In Hans Christian Andersen it is shown as the triumph of the small child, of the free thinker - and also the conman/trickster. Never liked the Sinead O'Connor song though.

Also 'conceptual detail' is all about, 'why only the one work?' (answer: because Creed wants the observer to consider their relationship to ONE work rather than have them compare how a few works react against one another) which is a curatorial choice. His, as his exhibitions usually only have one work in them. It's 'why? rather than 'what?'.

***I am only being facetious***

Possibly I should put a little red paper spot by the holes and boast about how much I sold the MCs for...

"The other shortlisted artists were: Mike Nelson, favourite with bookmakers to win, who works with rubbish and exhibited a labyrinth of planks; Richard Billingham, who exhibited photos and videos of his family, notably his alcoholic father who lives in a Glasgow slum; and Isaac Julien, who exhibited short films featuring homosexual cowboys."

There is a better argument for saying that yBa work = made of rubbish. In the late 1980's, when many of the artists of the Freeze generation were leaving art college, they used whatever was to hand, a lot of which materials were others' castoffs. In the Thatcherist climate of the time, using such materials was a fact of life and the political climate informed the work in many ways.

Yesterday I went to Tate Modern with Nick Currie (he was in town for an eye op) and we had a discussion about the nature of elites (they are fluid, not static, and there are many forms of The Elite). Why, for example, do we not bat an eyelash over the elite of sport (unless they misuse their status to bash Asians) but find ourselves gnashing and wailing about the elite of the art world. Is it envy, or something else?

Obviously there are diffs between the elites of sport and art - in fact in the current climate they are almost opposites. Sport is about the application of skills within a strict set of rules. Art - or a strand of it - is about the questioning or removal of rules. I would advance the idea that the well-rounded personality should take joy from both.

i would just like to point out that i got shouted at for saying this upthread. if tom doesn't get shouted at i am going to sulk :):)

One of my favourite works of art is The Rules by Angela Bulloch. It has, among other things, 'handkerchief code' for rent boys (eg. yellow hanky = does water sports).

Art comments on all ideas in society, and rules are ideas of a sort. Formalism is all about rules, d'oh. Sport and art are not mutually exclusive or even opposite; see Mark Wallinger's 'A Living Work Of Art' eg. a racehorse bought by the artist and put in races.

Another interesting comment thrown up at Suzy and Nick's Art Summit was that Western people were clamouring for figurative representation in their art and were confused/angered by a lack of same. This would of course be anathema to Muslims and abstract artists.

Things that amused me about the Creed thing:

Even though I'd stood at the edge watching it for a bit, when I walked across I still instinctively stopped as soon as the lights went out (daytime + clear skies + glass roof = Not actually very dark either). I saw other people doing this.
You can see it flicking on and off from the other rooms. This is PunXor.
As Nick kind of suggested, everyone came in and said "it's a light going on and off" and walked away without even looking at the thing. You'd think after they'd paid their £3 they would at least try.

So yeah, I was expecting to either be bored it by it and/or come up with some silly pseudo-intellectual justification to pretend I wasn't, but it just made me snigger.

The other stuff (that I didn't look at much):

Films: - A short arty dance film featuring semi-naked [possibly] homosexual models, no one's thought of that before. There was more to it than that, but it just seemed like such a dull starting point that I couldn't be bothered (I liked the split scren bits, rminds me of something, Len "Steal My Sunshine" video?).
- Quite pretty, wished I'd remembered the concept at the time
- Isn't this that God Lives Underwater/Roman Cappola video with the fat kid?
- [Didn't watch it really - Old people, ugggh]

Photos: Wasn't trying to link them or make references like Suzy sed, but thought they were nice anyway, if not that special (I liked the girl on the beach one best actually
Forgot about the forth guy - might have been interesting.

[If I got anything right, it's beginner's luck, promise]

The experience of the *freezing* installation in the currently in the Wapping Pump House place is well worth the (cost-free) ticket, too, with the added attractions of Prospect of Whitby / Captain Kidd / Town of Ramsgate diversions. Thames-side drinking, num.

Now I don't count myself among the ranks of the Turner Prize haters, but can anyone think of a more pointless gesture at inclusivity than this? As if the tine panel is going to se a nomination and go "oh yes, XXX's show of YYY at the ZZZ gallery, hadn't thought of that one, stick it on the list!"

If the TP is good for anything it's good for being the stony face of the unelected art elite.

And Mark S's going to the Tate Modern to see the Turner Prize last year.

Still think princess / pea thing is a great idea, though not perhaps quite as great as the urban myths plan.

also bah talitha just phoned to say let's meet for lunch except i was at another desk and didn't get her message till too late = hat trick of turners but the third is tinged with sadness

Miss P, on the other hand...

<3

"Turner Prize nominees form a collective so they all win"

https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/turner-prize-winner-2019-art-041219

the prize is only £25,000?

25k for the winner, 5k for other 3. so they split the 40k total 4 equal ways.

Great speech, exactly how it should be done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RoLMAf37qY