Becks Futures last night

1. Albrecht Durer is a bastard because he can draw better than me.
2. Martin Creed is a cunt because I can switch the lights off and on too.

Or the future of the husband of Posh.

(Real answer - not seen any of it yet, will return posthaste with opines - but as a rule I find video art very badly presented so signs aren't good.)

Alex - we've been asking Momus that final question for ages.

What's mo' I think you shunner even brung up the tawpic, young man, cos it only encourages 'em to think they're speshul. Pshaw!

the home truths thread was basically you bitching about the fact that John Peel won't give you a session disguised as 'artists being more gifted than mortals' type bollocks.

Anyway, what’s with the Texan stroke West Country twang? And who does this thread encourage? And if you’re talking about encouraging artists, well wouldn’t you say they need all the encouragement they can get?

We live in a society that is torn between two competing propositions.

1. Everybody is equally important. (Everyone is the same in value.)
2. Some people are better at stuff than others. (Some people are higher in value.)

This is related to another problem we have in our society:

1. We should be tolerant. (Ignore differences between people.)
2. We should make judgememts. (Recognise differences between people, ie when awarding prizes.)

Now, when it comes to something easily quantifiable, like sports, we are quite happy to say that someone is 'better' at something. But when the judgement required is more subjective, as Michael Landy's had to be when he chose the winner of the BF aware, we tend to be made anxious by the implication that X is 'better' than Y.

So my original (ironic) point about the cunts who can do things better and the bastards who we could do as well as was meant to point up this paradox: we are made uneasy by skill which differentiates people by ability (those not sportsmen, anyway), but also, contradictorily, we are made uneasy by a society which elevates (ie differentiates, raises on a pedestal) those without skill.

Now, tell me, in a year in which the BF is distinguishing itself (at least in the perspective of Philip Dodd) from the YBA period of the 90s, and the Saatchi Gallery over the river, by underlining the 'homemade' and the 'ordinary' (women shopping in a Glasgow market), aren't we witnessing precisely my anxiety about whether the ordinary and homemade 'truths' on parade in 'Home Truths' are worthy of my attention in the same way as the work of artists who are special (in the Home Truths argument, Bolan and Cutler, in the Beck's argument, Hirst et al)? Isn't this exactly the same question?

1. Everybody is equally important. (Everyone is the same in value.)
2. Some people are better at stuff than others.

are compteting. (I've left of the final parentheses deliberately).

Just because someone is better than someone at something it does not follow that that person is of higher value. Tolerance does not exclude the recognising of differences.

tolerant
adj 1: showing respect for the rights or opinions or practices of
others [ant: {intolerant}]
2: tolerant and forgiving under provocation; "our neighbor was
very kind about the window our son broke" [syn: {kind}]
3: showing or characterized by broad-mindedness; "a broad
political stance"; "generous and broad sympathies"; "a
liberal newspaper"; "tolerant of his opponent's opinions"
[syn: {broad}, {liberal}]
4: showing the capacity for endurance; "injustice can make us
tolerant and forgiving"; "a man patient of distractions"
[syn: {patient of}]

Tolerant just mean you put up with people, nothing more. Your logic just isn't.

As for the thread, I'm not a fan of prizes for art, there's something very country prep school about that. But it keeps the money go round of art going and raises the profile so I don't really mind it. At the end of the day Beck futures is part of an ad campaign for a beer company. It doen't really bother me, it's not like its cadbury's giving away sports equipment to people who eat chocolate bars.

The crux of what you are struggling with I believe is simply the general consensus that modern art is rubbish. This attitude is mostly peculiar to the UK and certainly prevalent in ill educated sections of society. Why do people insist that modern art is worthless? Because anyone could do it. But no-one really thinks about that statement – "because anyone could do it" – why should that mean it is "bad art?" Of course, there is no real answer to that, and in fact, the possibility of authorship is perhaps one of the most beautiful aspects to the sludge of postmodern culture, when you think about. Maybe.

The problem then, is less that we are uneasy with raising on a pedestal those 'without skill', and more that we begin by perceiving contemporary artists as 'without skill.'

That said, I agree that subjective, aesthetic judgements cause unease – but this unease is something that should be examined and celebrated rather than denigrated and dismissed – the general unwillingness to engage critically with contemporary art is one of the saddest things about this cold, grey country.

Images of elderly women rummaging through piles of old clothes at a Salvation Army jumble sale, over an aching soundtrack of a traditional Egyptian love song, won the artist Rosalind Nashashibi £24,000 and the Beck's Futures prize last night

ORDINARY IMAGES WIN A SPECIAL PRIZE!

The artist Michael Landy, the chairman of the judges, said the decision had been unanimous: "Rosalind's work is simply exceptional."

HER WORK IS SPECIAL!

The quiet woman with the movie camera, who likes to merge unnoticed with crowds and film everyday life,

THE SPECIAL MERGES WITH THE ORDINARY!

She intends to spend part of the money travelling to Mexico with Lucy Skaer, another of the shortlisted artists. "And, to be completely honest and unexciting, I would probably put nearly all of it down as a deposit for a flat."

SHE IS GOING TO DO SOMETHING QUITE ORDINARY WITH THE SPECIAL PRIZE!

Each of the remaining eight artists on the shortlist won £4,500, and the £2,000 student prize for film and video went to Richard Holgate. The exhibition continues at the ICA in London until May 18 and will then visit Southampton and Glasgow.

EVERYONE WAS A LITTLE BIT SPECIAL AND WON A LITTLE MONEY!
THE EXHIBITION LEAVES THE SPECIAL CITY AND WILL VISIT SOME ORDINARY ONES!

Charles Saatchi's huge and much-hyped new art gallery was dismissed yesterday as a "monument to the 90s", hopelessly out of touch with the rising wave of DIY and "bedroom" art.

SAATCHI'S JEWEL BOX OF SPECIAL PURCHASES IS PASSE, BECAUSE ORDINARY IS THE NEW SPECIAL!

Mr Dodd says his own gallery, which is holding the show for the Beck's Futures prize, the richest in the country, more truly reflects the next generation of British artist, who are tired of the "theatrical" art Mr Saatchi buys.

THE NEW THEATRE IS THE THEATRE OF THE ORDINARY! THE OLD THEATRE IS THEATRICAL!

"These artists make DIY art in a world where everything seems controlled, where General Tommy Franks stands in front of us every night on a Hollywood-designed set.

"This art is anti-design, anti-spectacular, about doing it yourself.

WE ARE ORDINARY, LIKE THE IRAQIS! SAATCHI IS SPECIAL, LIKE THE AMERICANS!

"It's not expensive. It doesn't need six assistants to make. It's bedroom art really, following an English tradition of innovation coming out of suburban single rooms."

HOME TRUTHS! THE SUBURBS! THE ORDINARY! THE NEW SPECIAL!

And you could say that this tendency is an expression of our horizontal society's unease with the very vertical ideas we associate with art:

-that art is hieratic, priestly, spiritual, a substitute for religion.

-that artists are different from ordinary people.

-that artistic inspiration takes us high above ordinary states of mind.

Etc.

We are fascinated by these 'high' and 'vertical' aspects of art, and we haven't relinquished them. They are still unspoken attributes of everyone proclaimed an artist. But we feel they need to be offset all the time by their opposites -- the ordinary, the horizontal, the humdrum. One of the duties of an artist is therefore to be, if they're white, an even bigger lout or slag than the average person. Alternatively, they can be from a culture which is 'under' the white culture, and upwardly mobile, and that makes them automatically forgiven for the 'vertical' values inherent in art. It makes their selection an act of horizontality, of levelling.

-that art is hieratic, priestly, spiritual, a substitute for religion.

-that artists are different from ordinary people.

-that artistic inspiration takes us high above ordinary states of mind.

In critical terms, these are outmoded, though perhaps there are sections in the mass who still cling to them.

Another point you make that I'd question is the notion that "One of the duties of an artist is therefore to be, if they're white, an even bigger lout or slag than the average person;" I think rather that the charade was more to do with presenting precisely that these artists were exactly like Joe Average.

Anyway, aren't your "still unspoken attributes of everyone proclaimed an artist" don't these attributes have honest foundations. It takes more than exhibitionism, I'd suggest, to hang a piece of yourself in a clinical white space under the spotlights.

The Salon des Refusees always becomes the New Academy in the end. The Young Turks become Old Fogeys. New Turks come along claiming to want to kick over all thrones and pedestals, but they really just want to climb up themselves and see the view from up there.

i like the sound of that momus but isn't there a basic self-defeating category problem - 'by its difference from ordinary life shall ye know it'
plus most want to locate the characteristic in the objects not the intentions/processes - so this breakdown between 'art' and 'other stuff' => Art gets Stuffed

and gallery-context-dependence seems all that's left:
=> a packet of fish fingers suspended in a glass case

i do like some modern art - but only craftily & aesthetically
conceptually it seems in need of a good plumber

can you read what i wrote on this thread again?
thanks.

I agree with Snowy that objects are important, and for obvious reasons we can't be assessing those here (I haven't seen the show, and snapshots on the BBC's website are not enough). So far all we're really discussing here is the Guardian's desire -- played up to by Dodd and Landy -- to frame the art in the ultra-banal terms of 'the ordinary being the new special'. Adrian Searle goes a little deeper elsewhere in the Grauniad, but ultimately it's a question of going for yourself to 'look without prejudice'. (Openings are never a good time to look at art.)

Where my Peel - Home Truths argument was perhaps weakest is when I said that Peel had 'gone from championing artists to championing the ordinary'. Peel stopping his cutting edge music show and only doing Home Truths might have laid him open to that criticism. But he did both shows. If he'd stopped The John Peel Show with a big proclamation that art was dead, and that Mr Johnson digging his cabbage patch was the new art, that would have been very different, especially if he then played recordings of the sound of the shovel going in and out of the earth for 20 minutes.

thanks for reading and not making leaps into the unknown.

i think the "who gets to say it's special" anxiety has been the primary motive force in western art since WW2 (my argt with momus on the home truths thread was i think that peel has always been an advocate of the "ordinary", of superior qualities which we can all discern w/o college degrees yada yada, and that actually that's what HE — JP — for example actually saw in ivor cutler, and indeed what he saw as the value of rock music as a cultural "movement", which he championed, and later punk as a convulsion within that, which he also championed... )

i think momus is absolutely correct to say that these various positions are all of them riddled with contradictions (mine certainly is: i'm very diffident abt ascribing quality in some places but when it comes to WRITING i'm extremely brutal and opinionated)

the still from the winning film that i saw in the guardian just now looks nice: apparent "ordinariness" of content of course goes back to brueghel at least, as a "high art" thing

one of the things i always tht curious abt the YBAs was that they were apparently so in awe of (some of) the luminaries of BritPop: as if to say, we're just folks too, we're BLUR FANS! (since fine art copping attitude over pop in terms of its inherent quality is something that irritates me, you'd imagine i'd be pleased with a generation of fine art ppl who were so carefully humble — guess what? it irritates me...)

The winner of this year's Becks Futures Award is Lord Ralph Lahaye-Hoq Pembleton, a young aristocrat. Philip Dodd, the exhibition's host, said 'His Lordship is such an eminent and prestigious person, we are just very very honoured to have his watercolours here at the ICA.'

The winner of this year's Becks Futures Award is Orko Penki, a Finn who claims to be from Ursa Major. Philip Dodd, host of the show, said 'Orko's work is just so strange, I can't even begin to describe it. It's... it's... none of us here at the ICA can fit it into any art world discourse at all. It just... it sits there and... it... I'm lost for words.'

The winner of this year's Becks Futures Award is The Reverend Walter Maertz of Augsburg. Philip Dodd commented 'The Reverend Maertz preaches in the gallery all day. His sermons are truly uplifting and their message is timeless, rendering art pretty meaningless in comparison. Through him speaks the one true God, the eternal, the almighty.'

The winner of this year's Becks Futures Award is the British Public. Philip Dodd commented 'They're great. We just couldn't find any artists this year who do anything anywhere near as interesting as the British Public, so we've decided to give the money to the nation. Congratulations, Britain, you've earned it! Don't spend it all at once!'

actually i read that thread a couple of months ago when i found it when searching for something else. it didn't 'rankle in my heart' or anything though i did think it was a really shit (but entertaining) thread. I'll try and read some of it again during the weekend and post here.

''You ought to have the guts to now engage the actual quesion here on its own merits''

I know fuck all abt art (never heard abt becks futures till today) but in yr first post here you did seem to take couple of things from the 'how are you feeling about ILX' thread so i thought I'd post a reply or two (and since I've heard peel's show for a few months many years ago before I got bored, I could follow the home truths thread).

Philip Dodd 'So, Rosalind, congratulations on winning the Becks Futures prize 2003! It's certainly a poke in the eye to all those elitists over the river that we've honoured such a normal person with this prize. It's also a poke in the eye for elitism in general that you film such ordinary people in your work. That's why we've decided to give your career such a big push, and help you to become the new elite! Here's the cheque.'

Rosalind: Thank you so much, Philip. Although I'm an artist, I'd like to accept this award on behalf of ordinary people everywhere.

Philip: You elitist bitch!

Rosalind: What? What did I say?

Philip: Nothing. It's just that you're the establishment, the orthodoxy, now, and it's my duty, as the head of a progressive and liberal institution, to attack you. Elitist! Has been!

Rosalind: (Bursts into tears.)

Another unlikely scenario:

Dodd: Well then Rosalind, I'm proud to present you with this award and cheque, *aside* OK sister, you can say a few words but please just don’t mention verticals, verticalness nor anything to do with vertigeny…

Rosalind (for it is she): *whispers* what? What are you talking about?

Dodd: Well the thing is, I’m just an ordinary guy who suffers from vertigo, so if you start banging on about that special v-word, I might puke all over the stage.

Rosalind: Cool!

Wim Wenders, A Famous Film Director who happens to be standing by: Did I tell ze amusing anekdote about ze dinner party vhere ve vere talking about ze…

Dodd: *spits* Shut it Gerry, I know your sort, you think you’re so fucking ordinary but really, you’re extra special cos you make these so-called critically acclaimed films and have all this boring charisma.

Wim Wenders: Err…

Rosalind: Look, can I have the cheque now?

Dodd: Take a walk honey – Christ you’re so fucking ordinary, what’s so special about that then? It’s like a tightrope walk between low and high… Hmm, maybe I have hit upon something there… in fact I feel a bit sick actually *starts retching violently*

Wim Wenders: Are you OK Herr Dood? *gesticulates to stage left that the curtain should be coming down just about now*

Dodd: Take your fucking hands off me asshole, urgh *he throws up*

Curtain falls, wild applause, End of Act III.

1. A lesbian Japanese architecture student, friend of a friend, is building a house in Mexico just now.

2. Bungalow Records here in Berlin, who used to big up Tokyo, are now bigging up Mexico City, having signed Los Fancy Free and compiled them with other Mexican bands on a record called Manos Arriba!

3. What do not one but two (Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer) of the shortlisted Becks artists do, once they get a bit of money, but hightail it to Mexico City?

Three vectors: we have trendlock. Mexico. Hotter than picante salsa.

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