Turner Prize

Hey! It's No.9 in an occasional series of 'top passive-aggressive statements'

Having thought for myself I pronounce blu-tack on wall = shit, light being turned on and off = shit. It doesn't reach me. I also don't believe that a requirement to research the motivation behind a piece of art = justification for the art per se. If they need to prove themselves through means other than the artwork, then it could be seen, at best, as a visual piece of commentary on the subject, but not art.

I wouldn't for a moment criticise any of you who like these pieces because they emotionally effect you in some way. Only you know whether this is the case or you're faking it, so no criticism would be necessary anyway.

suzy: tell us a BAD piece of art that's been in the turner recently (or is good/bad a trap too?)

originality is a trap: i forgot that one

sarah's and tim's reactions/styles-of-reception to art are the opposites of their attitudes to music: discuss

if I insulted you about the Pixies, I'm sorry: I only recall telling you how and why I thought they were rubbish. That's surely a different thing from your saying the *only* reason contemporary art exists is as a function of scenesterism and snobbery: that necessarily implies that anyone who does happen to enjoy contemporary art is in it for those reasons (champagne, opportunity to patronise others). I really don't think I trail around little galleries in London for that reason, and I also don't go to openings, precisely to avoid what you're talking about.

Scenesterism exists for sure, but is easily avoided. There is a whole lot more to contemporary art than that. Honestly.

I wonder if Suzy timed the Creed pieces lights coming on and off, or if she read that it was a period of 4.3 seconds.

The horse-race thing was a joke mostly and a comment on the prize (which is a pretty bad way to showcase contemporary art, no question). Also, rather crucially, he got it completely wrong.

There is a whole lot more to contemporary art than that. Honestly.

this is so true, which is why the ligging and the backslapping (both of which you have pointed out you do not indulge in!) is so annoying. once again i expressed my opinion badly and was making generalisations (always a bad idea on this board!) it's the whole "let's gang up on people who didn't think it was sooo witty when Madonna said motherfuckers" mentality that is annoying me, coupled with Suzy's assumption that this means i am insecure. i do like a lot of contemporary art, and i should see more, broaden my horizons and that. it's this Turner Prize thing that has really gotten my goat. it's the crumpled up paper and the blu-tack, and the posing. people like you and anthony who just love it and will defend it i really really have no wish to shout at, please believe me.

Mark C: I kind of agree with you in principle, but eagerly await examples of people who've written about loving a piece of art, but have only done so to be cool. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, it's just that, without examples, your righteous scorn appears to be directed towards persons of straw. And why no such scorn for people who write about music which doesn't connect with you?

I'm off to the ICA tonight... to watch some indie pop. Heh.

i like it (er "it": as haven't actually SEEN the creed piece) because it DOESN'T pretend to be deep. I am a Gemini. Deep = evil.

VdR won the Turner Prize at my party by finding a way to adjust my kitchen light so ppl don't bonk their head on it. I won it for spilling oily food all down my T-shirt as per usual and having to go and change into another one. Gareth won for putting cigarette and liquid in a plastic cup in the WRONG ORDER: heat melts plastic, liquid meant to dowse heat runs out of hole and through gaps in flooboard into my downstairs neighbour's ceiling.

WOAH NELLY (tm EMI or someone I should expect), where does this insecurity thing come from? Me having opinions which find problems with how I find art is treated and talked about != me feeling condescended to by the CONCEPT of "art". However I don't like feeling "forced" to check out [xxx] 'background research'. Neither do I like the same thing in music, for example, "she likes B&S therefore she should like Smiths ect accepted canon". It also seems then like the artists aren't saying anything themselves which isn't a reference…

And when I don't know something, instead of grumbling that someone's trying to make an arse of me because I'm just a stupid punter, I make an effort to learn to fill in my gaps.

Now that's uncalled for. I never described, or thought of myself in those terms. But it's good to know what you think, isn't it? Or hang on, am I being 'insecure'? And that wasn't the point I was getting at in the first place. Certainly you've said before that without the background you don't understand it as well. Fair enough, but I don't LIKE having to know a miriad of background information, taking "art" into the purely cereberal realm of The Knowledge which shuns that "gut reaction" talked about upthread.

Rest of what I have to say is expressed by people who got there before I did - sorry, I have dull filing and regular work to do as well! And of course Top Secret Work ahem. The winner of MY Turner Prize today is the horse that lives on the first floor of the building opposite to my office. He's grrr8!

it was one of the things we started to discuss at the Brains Trust table on Sat, but we got bogged down in a defn of modernisn because we are goofy egghedZoR (arose out of eg that old saw: pinefox is a modernist for books but not for pop)

my attitude to nu-art and music is the same: i like it all, all the time (except sometimes); and totally different to my attitude to eg writing (it is all terrible present co.excepted)

Okay, Mark, let's start with bad art in Turner this year: some of the Richard Billingham bits were tosh. I'm thinking of the photographs that were not part of the family series: one of a girl lying on sand, another of some unspecified landscape. They seemed too random. I like to see interconnectivity and a narrative in my art - classic writer business, I'm afraid. Billingham is in a difficult place with his work right now because his work is now part of the mainstream and he has not yet moved on/expanded on that initial spark. I know why: he is scared shitless. He has created something so instantly recognisable and iconic with the 'ray's a laugh' series (a lot of the framing is based on, say, Velasquez paintings) and is now hitting a wall of intimidation and insecurity as his reknown snowballs quicker than he can actually cope with it. He feels accidentally famous, and maybe that's a certain lack of sophistication catching up with him. He is so down-to-Earth as to be tough on himself, so he's going to have trouble for a while, and then pull out of it, because he is a really fantastic artist.

I say this as an *extreme* insider, incidentally: a close friend of mine dated R for almost two years, I've interviewed him twice, I'm not so removed from people who grew up like he did and I've known his gallerist for five years. I've had a lot of opportunity to talk to Richard about his work over the past three years and I came to it because I found his initial shows to be visceral and arresting. My only question - is this a voyeur? - was unequivocally answered NO the first time I read about him.

Mark S, I am really not aiming my "faker" accusations at you or anyone else on this thread (though, as I said earlier, some of you may well be faking it but only yourselves will know), so why the need to launch accusations of insecurity? Apologies to everyone if I've read things wrongly.

You're saying Billingham is something of a one-trick pony then, Suzy?

BTW I thought Madonna saying 'motherfuckers' was totally cheesy, but not half as cheesy as the stuff she said *before* the expletive. And she owns two Kahlos. Bitch.

who cares who wins the grammy or whatever?

Suzy, on the other, has a right to defend her expertise as being knowledge and not prima facie a. self-delusion, b. vacant snobby posturing (esp. as it's manifestly neither).

I'm kind of ambivalent abt the gleeful take- that-fuXoRs response, even though I sort of share it on kneejerk instinct: because I think it renders something a bit inaccessible which actually ought to be clearer. Which is that i. "I could have done that" is, as an expression of hostility and anger, really a rather weird kind of self- hatred, and I wish more of the post- Duchampians would work more on the implications of this (ie more Turner Prizes for everyone everywhere: use it as an energy, not a stick to beat Creed [ie yrself] with); ii. Oh sod, what was ii? Yeah, that I think it's REALLY REALLY rare that the makers themselves are full-on ten-gallon fakers. Yeah, fucked-up manipulative fuckers with complex self-destructive tides sometimes (why hullo johnny rotten you fine musician you), but actually working at someting real they couldn't do or show or explain or energise another way.

Also: "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a hateful little story.

Also also: television is better than art because art makes poor television (but not vice versa obv).

Traps = things you move to to explain the whole megilla which actually remove the purpose of unveiling the megilla in the first place (as opposed to going straight to the traps).

The Emporors New Clothes is only a hateful story if you are telling it from the Emp's P.O.V. In Hans Christian Andersen it is shown as the triumph of the small child, of the free thinker - and also the conman/trickster. Never liked the Sinead O'Connor song though.

Also 'conceptual detail' is all about, 'why only the one work?' (answer: because Creed wants the observer to consider their relationship to ONE work rather than have them compare how a few works react against one another) which is a curatorial choice. His, as his exhibitions usually only have one work in them. It's 'why? rather than 'what?'.

***I am only being facetious***

Possibly I should put a little red paper spot by the holes and boast about how much I sold the MCs for...

"The other shortlisted artists were: Mike Nelson, favourite with bookmakers to win, who works with rubbish and exhibited a labyrinth of planks; Richard Billingham, who exhibited photos and videos of his family, notably his alcoholic father who lives in a Glasgow slum; and Isaac Julien, who exhibited short films featuring homosexual cowboys."

There is a better argument for saying that yBa work = made of rubbish. In the late 1980's, when many of the artists of the Freeze generation were leaving art college, they used whatever was to hand, a lot of which materials were others' castoffs. In the Thatcherist climate of the time, using such materials was a fact of life and the political climate informed the work in many ways.

Yesterday I went to Tate Modern with Nick Currie (he was in town for an eye op) and we had a discussion about the nature of elites (they are fluid, not static, and there are many forms of The Elite). Why, for example, do we not bat an eyelash over the elite of sport (unless they misuse their status to bash Asians) but find ourselves gnashing and wailing about the elite of the art world. Is it envy, or something else?

Obviously there are diffs between the elites of sport and art - in fact in the current climate they are almost opposites. Sport is about the application of skills within a strict set of rules. Art - or a strand of it - is about the questioning or removal of rules. I would advance the idea that the well-rounded personality should take joy from both.

i would just like to point out that i got shouted at for saying this upthread. if tom doesn't get shouted at i am going to sulk :):)

One of my favourite works of art is The Rules by Angela Bulloch. It has, among other things, 'handkerchief code' for rent boys (eg. yellow hanky = does water sports).

Art comments on all ideas in society, and rules are ideas of a sort. Formalism is all about rules, d'oh. Sport and art are not mutually exclusive or even opposite; see Mark Wallinger's 'A Living Work Of Art' eg. a racehorse bought by the artist and put in races.

Another interesting comment thrown up at Suzy and Nick's Art Summit was that Western people were clamouring for figurative representation in their art and were confused/angered by a lack of same. This would of course be anathema to Muslims and abstract artists.