Jonathan Jones Likes Steve McQueen’s Hunger

Thanks Turner Prize for Discovering Him

December will be here soon and with it comes another Turner Prize winner. Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has good things to say about past-winner, Steve McQueen:

why does so much of today’s art seem content to remain in an adolescent or unformed state, at once abstract and uncommitted – why is it so lacking in human depth? Spend five minutes in London’s National Gallery and you will experience more humanity, more emotion, more of life than you can taste in a hundred art fairs. Why can our artists not rise to those heights, sink to those depths? Where’s our Rembrandt?Oh, wait, here he is. [ . . . ]

Hunger is, finally, an answer to the questions – is the Turner prize really about discovering talent? Does all this art that is so vaunted in modern Britain amount to anything? A talent like this is rare and without the Turner prize, without the world of contemporary art in all its vanity, Hunger would not exist. The same goes for to this year’s Turner, whose frontrunner is the film-maker Runa Islam.

Steve McQueen is our Rembrandt (Guardian Blogs)