Why Does This Sentence Piss me off

Split infinitive?

Though on closer inspection it isn't.

The word unusual is redundant since it has already told us that "conventional" art was being overlooked (which is also incorrect as paintings and sculptures have regularly been part of the set up).

also i am sure that no elephants painting with their dung have ever been admitted! though I COULD BE WRONG.

And it has a full stop in the middle. Very annoying.

ooh Katie very good I missed that.

My sister's friend from school is on the list. Hurrah!

[not the elephant dung list]

Hmm. It annoys me because of the 'z' in 'criticised'. That only annoys me because I am too dense to change the setting on Microsoft Word to English settings. Everytime I type anything the bloody computer undermines me. It's doing terribly things to my self confidence.

The prize has regularly been criticized for overlooking more conventional art forms. Some of the more unusual entries in recent years have included a soiled bed, a pickled cow and an elephant dung painting.

(a) "Unusual" undermines argument by implying that those examples are unrepresentative of "usual" prize-winners, making them irrelevant to first sentence. But I'm guessing Anthony is more annoyed with (b) two- word descriptions of art not really capturing whether they're "conventionally" good. I mean, it could be an elephant-dung reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which would be pretty impressive. Alternately you could describe the Venus de Milo, a Pollock, and a Picasso as "a chick without arms, a chick with two faces, and some spilled paint."

those are pretty good descriptions, nabisco!!

it's his copy editor's soul.

i like the idea of a pollock as a "a chick with two faces" and a picasso as "spilled paint."

Preserving list order: Classic or Dud?

No, the Picasso is the spilled paint. The Pollock is a chick with two faces if you squint really really hard and think of that red bit as her other nose.

anythony I don't know why it pisses you off. Don't these pieces derive a lot of their frisson from the exact same chunky and unsophisticated physicality that those curt descriptions point up?

Tracer- I guess i expect more nuance in my writing.

i expect more nuance in my art! (yes i own all of it) Well the chris ofili i like actually. kind of. that one was a low blow. i just mean you can't be like Here is My Pickled Cow and then complain when people say "i just saw a pickled cow!!"

Here's why it annoys me. Let's look at these lines as a sort of drama, being enacted on the social stage. Every drama needs a dramatis personae, a cast, right? So who makes up the cast in this two sentence play?

'The prize has regularly been criticized'... Okay, group one on the cast list:

'The Guys who Criticize the Prize' (not all guys, I just put that in because it rhymes). Let's say there are three of them, although there might be 3000. Three fit the stage better. You can ring up three for quotes more easily than 3000.

'...for overlooking more conventional art forms'. Okay, this creates a bunch of conventional artists spurned by the prize. Let's call them:

'The Sunday Painters', and again, let's put three on the stage, three neglected greats whose work impresses Prince Charles and Brian Sewell. They are angry, very angry. They pace up and down, ejaculating posh obscenities. Ocassionally they bump into their champions, the 'Guys', and go into a huddle with them, planning reactionary coups to wrest the British art world away from the Saatchis and the Serotas.

Then we have the 'Unusual Entrists', very clearly identified in the AP story as Emin, Hirst and Ofili. So there are three of them on the stage too. That makes nine cast members. Let the play begin!

Ah, but wait! There's a tenth cast member, and that's the narrator, in this case the AP itself. The AP reporter is the Orson Welles of this little drama, half in the story and half out of it. All the other characters are confined to the art world, but 'AP Orson' is in a bigger world, the world of popular storytelling. It's AP Orson's job to set one little social group neatly against another, making a sort of amusing cock fight for people who would otherwise be fairly indifferent to the often inexplicable microworlds which make up our very big, very complex societies.

AP Orson knows that the formal questions that mostly concern artists don't really interest his listeners. What makes them sit up and pay attention are the same narratives AP uses in the Sports Pages, the Politics Pages, and the Fashion Pages. So AP spins his old tale of politics (the old battle of the conservatives versus the liberals), his old tale of sport (the battle for the 'cup'), his Strange But True angle (the 'kooky' soiled bed, picked cow, and dung angle), his sex angle (Tracey's bed, Tracey's tent, etc etc)...

In this way AP Orson completely misrepresents most contemporary art, while appearing to 'cover' it. Or, worse, brings the more impressionable, populist artists over to his own narrative mode in search of wider fame.

I think what really bugs me, though, is AP Orson's obvious desire to have it both ways. AP Orson carefully writes the account in order to accommodate and satisfy both his conservative readers and his novelty-seeking readers. The prize gets marked out, in his account, as a social target (if only for some conservatives), and yet he also makes sure to point out how jolly exciting the 'unusual entries' are.

What this ends up doing is making the art world about as recognisable as your favourite youth subculture (skating, tagging, say) when you see it all spruced up and re-engineered for an appearance in a Disney movie. But it also works with the same logic as the tabloid newspapers. People are bored, show them interesting things. (Tits, a soiled bed, whatever.) People are conservative, whip up a synthetic moral debate about the very things you're showing them to stop them dying of boredom. Therefore give them the opportunity to condemn and enjoy at the same time. Encourage them to understand the 'otherness' of art narratives in terms of the same old master narratives they read daily in the papers. Close the door to the cognitive freshness that is the whole point of art.

Art is old. I'm waiting for something else. Something less commercial.

to allow yrself to be entered for an annual arts prize is to announce to the world, "I COMPLETELY ACCEPT THE VALUES AND MISPERCEPTIONS OF NEWSPAPERS CARRY ON BOYS THE UPSIDE IS BETTER THAN THE DOWNSIDE HURRAH!!"

cf also when organisers of demonstrations whine that their demo didn't get into the paper

what newspapers ought to do is what you/we force them to do: of course they don't understand art, they understand daily deadlines, wordlength, and the pulse of the readership figures

As far as I know, Sarah Lucas is the only artist to have refused to let herself be entered for the Turner.

I was just reading Matthew Collings' column in Modern Painters. He said he'd included the Chapman Brothers in a show he'd put together in Milton Keynes recently (his first curatorial outing) because they had mastered both the critical things that concern people in the art world and the kind of things that matter in the big world. So I suppose he's saying, quite rightly, that art has one foot in AP Orson's world and one in pure form, art history, etc. Interesting, then, that Sarah Lucas's early work was just big blown-up, painted tabloids, and yet her refusal to enter the Turner fray could be seen as a refusal to become 'two fried eggs and a kebab' on the tabloids' greasy plate.

I read the column too and I thought that COllings was just bitching but Art Forum singled out the curartory(sp) fuck ups of the royal acacdemy. Collings bothers me it might be because I find his jocualrity false but mostly because he has the oppoiste(sp) problem to the AP dude. He suggests this chummy aren't we all freinds vibe that slickly sees contempo art like its cars or George Foreman Grills.

funnily enuff seeing le tigre last night, then reading joy press in the wire this morning about them, is a related play on the same dilemma

EXPAND, please! My FAILURE TO HAVE READ OR EVEN UNDERSTOOD Joy's argument is urgent and key here. Was she talking about them as artworld chicks not up to speed with the Real World?

hanna's question = how shd riot grrrl respond to wide media attention: by retreating back into its untainted self (= remain politically ineffective) vs [well, here is where the dilemma is]? (her answer is: LE TIGRE is the answer — which is Show not Tell, of course)

JP in that piece is a bit vague abt all this and not especially insightful (she identifies some of the main background elements, but lets them get a bit drifted up in silts of explanation-which-is-actually-detoxification) (also she is almost totally uninterested in music or performance, apparently: "ideas" as JP sees it are things you found earlier in a book by a French(wo)man, NOT things you maybe heard on a record or saw on TV); KH i think intuitively far more interesting — not least as she's clearly a bundle of contradictions — but also a. only usefully articulate w.hindsight, and b. better onstage than in interview => KH recognises that getting into the papers (=getting Big and Pop and Global), is only dilution/estrangement if you choose to let it be, *but* that there's an awful huge major lot of potential difficulty and stress and likely error/disaster packed into that 'let"...

(KH much more up-to-speed ie than JP, in my opinion)

(Translation: I enjoyed the show a lot, then when I read the article i tht, "If I had read this BEFORE the show, i probably wouldn't have bothered... )

I love this thread. As does my cow, who would comment herself but she's off in the other room getting pickled.

i just noticed momus is saying "urgent and key"!! maybe influence DOES EXIST AFTER ALL!

INFLUENCE /=> PARODY

Parody=insincere reflection

Sincerity=overrated