[Nettime-ro] For your attention

[bory@xmail.com]

bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

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Note from bory:

Turner prize is back with a revenge!!!
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

The Turner is a turn-off
Martin Kettle
Thursday December 05 2002
The Guardian


A visit to the exhibition at Tate Britain of work by the four artists on the shortlist for this year's Turner prize is an unsettling experience for anyone who wants to think well of the visual arts in the UK today. 

The first thing you notice as you enter the gallery is not so much the art itself as the fact that not many people are there - and that those who are there don't seem to be looking at the art. In the rooms the women come and go - men too - but they don't seem to be talking of Michelangelo or, more alarmingly, of any of the artists from whom this year's winner will be chosen on Sunday. Mostly, they just read the blurbs about the artists, glance briefly around them at the works and move on.  

The room which triggers most response from visitors is undoubtedly the first, where Keith Tyson's work is on display. Tyson's paintings and drawings actually make people smile. Bubble Chambers, his pair of brightly coloured canvases covered with shards of language, is the one piece in the whole exhibition where people actually stop and stare a while.  

By contrast, no one seems inclined to linger in the following room, occupied by Liam Gillick's multi-coloured Perspex ceiling. Most people walk straight through, almost as if they are unaware that this is one of the final four entries.  

Things are slightly more encouraging in the theatres which show Catherine Yass's films, Flight and Descent. Even here, there is little sense that visitors are gripped. Descent, for example, lasts more than eight minutes. The catalogue describes it as beautifully meditative. When I was there, though, nobody stuck around for more than two minutes.  

Fiona Banner's so-called wordscapes hold the visitors for longer. Even so, once you have read a few words of her pornographic Arsewoman in Wonderland, you soon get the idea, and no one seems inclined to pore too long (or too publicly) over her closely written accounts of hard-core sex. Many visitors look embarrassed and head for the exit.  

Ironically, the exit takes them into the one room in the exhibition which vibrates with energy. This room contains no artworks. Instead it is hung with visitors' comments on what they have just seen. It was here that arts minister Kim Howells set the cultural world's tongues clacking when he wrote that what he had just seen was a dreadful testimony to the state of the arts in this country. Weeks later, lots of the recent notes pinned on the wall still back the minister. A few make positive comments about those shortlisted - most of them about Tyson. If public favour counts for anything, Tyson will win the Turner. My own vote would be for Yass. So it should be a shoo-in for Gillick.  

Going to the exhibition raises a question. Is it just that this year's shortlist is lacklustre? Or is this year just part of a larger problem? The answer is the latter. If there is a big message in the Turner prize exhibition, it is that there is a huge public demand for the arts, but it is not being met by the artists.  

Admittedly, this is a charge which has often been made in all the arts in the past, and has been made in many different societies, and by some very unsavoury figures. But it continues to be made, and it seems to be a particular problem for the visual arts. This may be because, more than any of the other arts, the visual arts have failed to get beyond the trauma of modernism, when European artists of many kinds decisively turned their backs on public taste and became a priesthood primarily concerned to communicate with fellow artists.  

To put it crudely, a century ago a generation of writers stopped writing books that the public liked to read; a generation of musicians stopped writing music that the public enjoyed listening to; and a generation of painters and sculptors stopped creating works the public liked to look at. In some ways it was a truly magnificent moment. Much of the work of those years was stunning. Much of it has endured. Some of it has now entered the mainstream, though much of it has not. But that was then and this is now. And some of the ideas about art that were generated at that time continue to exercise excessive influence today. None of them has been more baleful than the belief that artists must make no compromise with the public.  

"Modern" music and "modern" art have struggled with these issues for decades. But music has made greater progress towards finding a way of combining innovation, creative craft and popularity. On a weekend when Covent Garden is packed for a new opera by Nicholas Maw, too few visitors will pass through the Turner prize exhibition. The public appetite for the new and excellent is there. But not all the arts have worked out how to satisfy it.  

martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk  

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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