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Russian Art Prize Blowback

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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)

All Tomorrow's Parties

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At Art Basel Miami, Malcolm McLaren is getting back in the act:

Mr. McLaren allowed that since he had attended several art schools (and been thrown out of most of them), he was coming full circle. He also copped to being an opportunist. “I’m trying to meet the zeitgeist,” he said, “and art is the hottest cultural form around.”

David Velasco’s Art Forum Diary entry gives us this scene of Takashi Murakami:

Arriving very late for the latter, I bumped into a blissed-out Takashi Murakami, wearing a massive plush ball of a suit and dancing wildly in the gallery’s foyer. “You look familiar. Are you one of Perrotin’s artists?” asked a curious woman. Murakami nodded vociferously but didn’t stop prancing. “He’s finally living his ultimate dream—he’s become a giant cartoon character,” a friend observed. I couldn’t shake from my mind the acute perverseness of the gesture; its amalgamation of “furry” sexual subcultures and his performance of the artist as court jester hit all the right notes.

And the Independent‘s Arifa Akbar gives us the scene inside the Turner Prize party:

Germaine Greer stood imperiously at one end of the hall, while Sir Nicholas Serota hugged Nicky Haslam warmly at the other and dismissed the bile visited upon the Turner every year. “It was conceived as a prize to raise public debate, which is what it continues to do,” he said. Antony Gormley, another Turner laureate, was momentarily gripped by a huge sculpture which he gazed upon in awe.

Anarchy? Not It’s Art (New York Times)

Fair Enough (Art Forum)

The Fine Art of Revelry (The Independent)

Not a Pretty Picture

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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

Lecky Wins Turner; Art World Yawns

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Amid a chorus of ennui, the Turner Prize is awarded to pop-culture-saturated Mark Lecky. Here’s Bloomberg‘s version:

“That’s what I know, that’s what I grew up with, and that’s what has ultimately affected me,” Leckey said of his focus on moving images. “I can’t differentiate my true desires from the pictures, from movies, from film, from television.” He said his ambition now was to have his own arts variety show on TV, with music, performance, and talks.

Leckey, from the northern-English town of Birkenhead, sprang to fame with a 1999 film titled “Fiorucci Made me Hardcore,” where he surveyed the history of the U.K.’s underground club culture from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

And jury Chair Stephen Deuchar addressed the complaints:

“Sounding the death knell of the Turner Prize seems to be part of the sport of the prize itself,” he said, explaining that the Turner “was created in order to generate contemporary art in Britain. The success of the prize to some extent can be measured by the amount of debate that it generates.”

Leckey Wins Turner Prize, Aided by Felix the Cat, Homer Simpson (Bloomberg)

Turner Finds a Prize

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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)

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