Martin Gayford is tired of the Turner prize:
The glory days, in retrospect, were from the mid- to late 1990s. That is, from 1995 — when Damien Hirst triumphantly won with a sculpture consisting of a calf and mother cow divided into sections — to 1999 when Tracey Emin failed to bag it with her unmade bed, though she did garner gobs of publicity.
Those two, whatever you think of them as artists, were worth having an argument about. Since then, though, it has been a trundle down hill and this year we’ve reached a shortlist containing no shock, pizzazz or novelty, nothing but a series of pulse-lowering installation/video works. The winner is to be announced on Dec. 1, though only a career art bureaucrat — a Tate curator, perhaps — could get excited about it.
Turner Prize Is Getting Boring, Let’s Retire It: Martin Gayford (Bloomberg)
