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

Shock & Sensation

One of the perennial questions raised by the Turner Prize is whether the elements of shock and sensation which fuel its media coverage help or hinder the organisers’ aim of bringing contemporary art to a wider public.

The ‘shock’ element seems to take two forms: dislike of the content or subject matter of the art on display (pornography, the inside of the artist’s body, dead babies) and dismay at the materials used (dead animals, elephant dung, unmade bed, rice). Since few shortlists seem to have been without one or the other, the annual repetition of exhibition and shocked response seems to suggest that the Tate has only widened the gulf between artists and public. As Andrew Graham Dixon has argued ‘Public discussion of art .. is the last thing that the prize has promoted. Vituperation, spleen, the widening of rifts between the various bitter factions that make up the British art world and the endless asking of the same old question, ‘But is it art?’. These are what it promotes.’

So has the Turner Prize actually done a great disservice to contemporary art by making everyone simply expect to be shocked by its exhibitions, so that they feel bored or cheated if it doesn’t happen? The 1996 shortlist for the prize provoked Brian Sewell into complaining that ‘If the Turner Prize is trying to commit suicide by boring the pants off us they are going the right way about it’. Another had to admit that ‘With this tedious lot one is tempted to shout “Come back Damien all is forgiven”’.

Many critics have commented on the mutual dependence of the relationship between the Turner Prize and the media pundits who attack it. As Martin Gayford pointed out in the Spectator, the opponents of the Prize contribute to the success of the event: ‘The higher blood pressure and the raised public profile are, of course, closely connected. It is largely its detractors, I suspect, who have made the Turner Prize as prominent as it is.’

So perhaps it is the organisers’ aim of introducing contemporary art to a wider public that is the problem? Iain Gale has argued, in Scotland on Sunday, that the price the Turner Prize pays to achieve this is too high: what success it does have in getting more people interested in modern art is achieved only at the expense of ‘perpetuating the sad myth of art as outrage and playing into the hands of a dumbed-down press who prey upon the worst prejudices of a repressed and under-informed audience’.

In fact, some people have accused the Tate of hypocrisy in claiming that it wants to involve more people in contemporary art; even the presenter of the annual awards ceremony for Channel 4, Matthew Collings, has suspected that the language of modern art was impenetrable for newcomers: ‘The Tate people are masters of putting on the aura. This stuff is indefinable. It’s absolutely impossible for someone untrained to read the voodoo aura stuff.’ Or is it that the annual invitation to the Turner Prize exhibition falsely suggests to many visitors that the enjoyment of contemporary art is automatic and easy? Is the problem that whereas we accept that certain disciplines – mathematics, dentistry, betting on horses – need study and preparation, contemporary art is required to have immediate appeal? Certainly the Prize has increased many people’s familiarity with contemporary art, but that may not be the same as having a serious interest in it.

Both this problem and its answers come from the same source: the media, and in particular the press. Some of the press have for years over-estimated the hostility of large sections of the public to contemporary art. It was only with the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 that many critics could no longer avoid acknowledging the huge numbers of people who were interested enough to come and see for themselves. There are of course honourable exceptions. As long ago as 1993 Stephen Pile argued in the Daily Telegraph that not only was the contemporary art in that year’s Turner Prize exhibition nowhere near as weird and incomprehensible as the traditional art on show at the National Gallery, but most of the visitors to the show weren’t half as shocked and outraged by Vong Phaophanit’s Neon Rice Field and Rachel Whiteread’s Unititled (Room) as the press would like to think. In fact, he suggested that no-one found the work difficult at all. ‘My vox pop showed that visitors universally liked all four artists’.

It was only last year, with the introduction of the Comments Cards into the final room of the exhibition, that there was any real means of gauging what the ‘wider public’ actually thought of what they had just seen. The cards dispelled all idea of it being a simple case of shocked visitors versus indifferent Tate. A large number of the comments were eloquent defences of the work of the four artists. Many showed despair at knee-jerk reactions – for all that it was the knee-jerk reaction of one very high-profile visitor which received most of the press attention. The Comments Cards also showed that the public’s favourite artists was the same as the judges’: Keith Tyson.

Of course, Tate Britain still receives many letters expressing outrage at the selection of works to be exhibited every year. But a surprising number of these come from people who have not seen the works they are complaining about. So maybe Marina Vaizey was right to say that it is a good thing that people knock the Turner Prize, as prizes that are knocked are probably the only ones that are worthwhile.