Reports from the Kandinsky prize ceremony add a dark overtone to events in Russia. First there was the controversy over the winner, Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt:

“The problem is not just that the artist is ultra-right, but that he tries to make an artistic career on his political views,” said Marat Guelman, whose gallery M&J Guelman Gallery represents Osmolovsky. “This decision could hurt the prestige and influence of the Kandinsky Prize.”

Many in the audience, and the previous year’s winner of the prize designed to raise the profile of Russian art, jeered the selection. Beliayev-Guintovt responded with his own kind words:

“My art represents the majority of Russians, while my critics are from the liberal minority,” said Beliayev-Guintovt. “I want my art to mobilize people to support our country’s traditions.”

But the undertone of danger came to life when a group of young artists called the PG Group won a prize for the Best Media Art Project:

“Mounting Mobile Agitation,” about the images in the mind of a Russian teenager, including one that shows the Chinese in traditional dress overrunning Red Square and the Kremlin.

To receive the award, the three young men that comprise the group came on stage wearing ski masks, announcing themselves to be the Moscow representatives of Somali pirates.

“The future belongs to people in masks,” one member of the group said, to a stunned audience. “Your fat-cat lifestyle will soon end and then you’ll all be hung up high.”

“We’re not joking,” he added.

Silence descended on the room, followed by meek applause.

Jeers, Cheers Greet Kandinsky Winner, Painter Beliayev-Guintovt (Bloomberg)

This year’s Turner prize seems to have exhausted nearly everyone involved. But the International Herald Tribune covers the work in a positive, though maybe not entirely convincing, way:

“Art today is no longer about pretty pictures,” said Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary-art museum space in Paris. “The artist is free to express whatever he wants; artworks are more often than not frustrating, troubling and make the viewer re-examine his preconceptions.”

This year’s short-listed artists were not especially easy to understand, said Deuchar, the jury chairman. But, he added in a interview broadcast by the BBC, “the public is not frightened by art that requires some investigation and whose meaning is not instantly clear.” [ . . . ]

(A more defiant defense of the Turner prize work after the jump.)Continue Reading

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)