But is it art?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Minister attacks Turner art

Culture minister Kim Howells has denounced the modern art up for this year's Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".
Mr Howells left a note at the Tate Britain gallery, where the nominated work is on display, saying British art was "lost" if that was the best it could produce.

I'm sure I'm not the only person that thinks that if a piece of 'Art' can't connect in some way to Joe Public, and is comprehensible only to a narrow clique of art students, it's not really art, but pretentious nonsense. Or does that just make me a hopeless philistine?

The Turner Prize's best moment was when it was sent up by "The K Foundation" with their competition for the worst piece of art of the year, the nominations for which were just coincidentally the same as the four entrants for the Turner Prize.

What is art anyway? Why not take a model railway layout (preferably an accurate fine-scale layout in the Mostyn league), operate it to a strict prototypical timetable, and call it a piece of performance art? I'm sure at least as much effort goes into researching and building a project like Mostyn as goes into some of the Turner entries, such as that light flashing on and off.

Posted by TimHall at October 31, 2002 02:05 PM | TrackBack

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