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Introduction |
Awards Game |
Conceptual Art |
Craft & Skill |
Painting |
Shock & Sensation
Women in the Turner Prize |
Cliques & Cabals |
Why the Turner Prize is a Good Thing
Why the Turner Prize is a Good Thing
Obviously, it is ludicrous to put a painter, say, in the same competition as an installation artist. But the point is that by so doing some kind of interest in contemporary art is temporarily generated. The Turner Prize has been in existence now for twenty years and although it’s clear that much of the excitement surrounding it abated some time ago, it seems that for the foreseeable future anyway, a new crop of artists will be presented with no small fanfare each year and that each year the media will dutifully make an effort to be interested, even scandalised. Indeed, the Turner Prize re-kindles the otherwise virtually extinguished flame of avant-garde outrage, making artists and the art world feel that what they are doing is actually….yes…shocking people out there.
Though this outrage is often provoked by the most trivial things, such media interest is nevertheless important because it gives contemporary art a small piece of the limelight and thereby releases it from the cultural ghetto in which it lives the rest of the time.
This, in the end, is why for me the Turner Prize is important. It brings the small and parochial art world into brief contact with the vast and usually indifferent masses. As a result, entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking - even cultural significant - things can happen. Being reminded, for example, of how little most people actually care about contemporary art is always useful. It is equaly sobering to see how little progress the avant-garde has made in making ordinary people recognise the importance of Marcel Duchamp and the conceptual, idea-based art that he gave birth to.
(A joke heard recently: Awards are like haemorrhoids. Wait long enough and every arsehole gets one.)
Simon Morley, writer and educator |
