The Turner Prize attracts the bizarre, but has it becoming boring?

At the risk of falling into the free publicity trap (which just happened) stories about the Turner Prize turn out to generate fame for the artists and revenue for the Tate Britain Museum where it is staged, and annually generates the same question. Is it art? It isn’t, of course, unless you are using modern standards, which means that anything is art. It has lured a range of artists from the kooky (that’s the low end) to the kookier, and proud to display works like the Chapman Brothers sculpture  Death in 2003, a bronze painted to look like cheap, plastic blow-up sex dolls with a dildo performing the delicate art the French call “Soixante-neuf,” or 69 for you initiated to mutual oral pleasure. That was one of the highlights.  Past winners have included Mark Wallinger, for a film of himself dressed in a bear costume walking around an empty museum, presented by American actor Dennis Hopper, who could be an exhibit himself for this prize; Felix the Cat lover Mark Leckey, for his depiction of the American television cartoon character Homer Simpson; someone whose work was lights going off and on in an empty room, which prompted a real artist, Jacqueline Crofton to throw eggs at the walls of the rooms in protest, thereby creating a better work; a film showing actors dressed like cops standing still for an hour, unless you count them scratching themselves where it itches; balls of elephant dung; and pornography a porn star called “conceptual bullshit.” The Turner has been propelled to the front page by the works of the YBA’s, the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s that has begun to wane.
The 2009 exhibit just opened, this time more to yawns than yelps from critics, and the winner will be announced in December, so there’s plenty of time for even faux outrage to die down, but the Turner gets the most art attention in the United Kingdom and Europe than any other because it’s the equivalent of Eurovision, or what one especially sharp critic derailed as “crap art competition.” There are a number of exhibits by four alleged artists, with bookmakers putting their money on Roger Hiorns, whose prize work is a black blob on the floor, the results of a jet engine melted down and sprayed through a nozzle to form a pile of fine granules, and about as toxic. Another finalist, Lucy Skaer, displays the skull of a sperm whale behind a screen. Artists Enrico David and Richard Wright also were shortlisted and bidding for the GBP 25,000, or $39,850 award. Wright’s work, the dark horse choice, features an intricate gold-leaf pattern across a wall of the gallery. David’s work includes a figurative painting and two papier mache egg men with Humpty-Dumpty faces riding on rockers from a rocking-chair, but got scant attention from critics who said it was “lightweight” art, which is the Turner equivalent of damning with no praise.
The Turner Prize, curiously, is named after a real painter of renown, J. M. W. Turner, an 18th-Century landscape impressionist, and is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom’s most publicized art award, thereby eclipsing the work of actual, talented artists who aren’t seeking fame, hype and money. One surprised winner exclaimed, “Oh man, thank God, where’s my money.” Although it represents all media, and painters have also won the prize, it has become associated primarily with conceptual art.  There have been different sponsors, including Channel 4 television and Gordon’s Gin, not a bad choice since being drunk while you’re looking at this stuff helps out a lot, like smoking pot while watching the Beatles Yellow Submarine. The prize is awarded by a distinguished celebrity: in 2006 this was Yoko Ono, distinguished because she was married to former Beatle John Lennon, who’d be a shoo-in winner for the Turner if he was still alive.  It is a controversial event, mainly for the exhibits, such as a shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst and a disheveled bed by Tracey Emin. Controversy has also come from other directions, including a Culture Minister (Kim Howells) criticizing exhibits, a guest of honor (Madonna) swearing, a prize judge (Lynn Barber) writing in the press, and a speech by Sir Nicholas Serota (about the purchase of a trustee’s work.)

It’s not art
The event is so reviled by real artists and art critics that the criticism backfires and generates more publicity and money for artists who otherwise wouldn’t be able to sell their works on the street. A backlash group called The Stuckists excoriate it as worthless, and critic Jonathan Jones dismissed it brutally when he wrote:  “Turner Prize art is based on a formula where something looks startling at first and then turns out to be expressing some kind of banal idea, which somebody will be sure to tell you about. The ideas are never important or even really ideas, more notions, like the notions in advertising. Nobody pursues them anyway, because there’s nothing there to pursue.” It’s supposed to be shock art, but it doesn’t shock anymore because it’s ridiculousness to most critics has become so predictable, but it still makes bad artists rich and holds British art up to enduring ridicule in the European Union and around the world, even though the way the media gushes over it you’d think it was the Nobel Prize nominees being announced, who are announced about the same time and almost overshadowed by it.
Bloomberg art critic Martin Gayford said he was disappointed even more than usual by this year’s nominees. “There’s no sensation, no video, no blood, no outrage. Arts commentators may feel disoriented. Without the shock factor to discuss, what can you say about this year’s event?” he wrote, even though he compared Hiorns to a Renaissance alchemist. Hiorns is known for other conceptual works, such as coating a flat in London with blue-green crystals. He wrote that Skaer’s Leviathan’s Edge, which includes the gigantic skull of a sperm whale, seems to raise the ghost of Brit Art past. Defunct marine creatures, after all, are a notorious component in Damien Hirst’s oeuvre.”
The most searing criticism comes from the Stuckists, who, in response to Hirst’s work of a dead shark in a tank filled with formaldehyde, said succinctly: “A dead shark isn’t art,” although it made Hirst rich and they’re still invisible. They were joined by critic Norman Tebbit, who wrote: “Have they gone stark raving mad? The works of the ‘artist’ are lumps of dead animals.”
There are enthusiastic supporters, even among art critics, including Richard Cook, who wrote that, “There will never be a substitute for approaching new art with an open mind, unencumbered by rancid clichés. As long as the Turner Prize facilitates such engagement, the buzz surrounding it will remain a minor distraction.” Newspaper columnist Janet Street-Porter condemned what she called the Stuckists’ “feeble knee-jerk reaction” to the prize and said: “The Turner Prize and Becks Futures both entice thousands of young people into art galleries for the first time every year. They fulfill a valuable role.”
Author Sarah Thornton put it best, perhaps, when she wrote that the Turner Prize “has a reputation for being a reliable indicator of an artist’s ability to sustain a vibrant art practice over the long term, but perhaps it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal confidence gained from being nominated can galvanize an artist’s ambitions, while the museum’s public endorsement leads to further exhibition opportunities,” which is, of course, the purpose of the whole event: to generate buzz and money, not to elevate or even create art, but to create attention and wealth.
Most of the artists nominated for the prize selection become known to the general public for the first time as a consequence, some have talked of the difficulty of the sudden media exposure. Sale prices of the winners have generally increased. Chris Ofili, Anish Kapoor and Jeremy Deller later became trustees of the Tate. Some artists, notably Sarah Lucas, have declined the invitation to be nominated.
The Stuckists stood outside the Tate on the River Thames where the award is staged and called for the “tired” and “exhausted” show to be scrapped, but curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas defended the institution and told Reuters that, “Art has more of a place in contemporary British culture than ever before. “ And, of course, she noted that last year there were 90,000 paying customers.