This year’s Turner Prize for art, yawn

The piece is broadly Postmodernist and specifically Symbolist, as it is recognizable objects (traffic barriers, flags, police tape) that are chosen, placed in a stylized space (gallery, prize competition) and with some textual suggestions (“austerity,” “Brexit,” “pandemic,” “hostile immigration policy”) so the viewer can infer the intended negative message about the state of the culture.

Plus some bonus politicking: “Jesse Darling, the first transgender winner, accepted the award while waiving a Palestinian flag.”

The piece continues the tradition in which Damien Hirst (Turner Prize, 1995: bisected cow and calf in formaldehyde), Tracey Emin (Turner Prize nominee, 1999: semen-stained bedsheets and strewn condoms), and Martin Creed (Turner Prize, 2001: see more here).

Taking the Turner art world as representative of high-art culture, the consistent messages are relentless negativity combined with anti-representational media. The “yawn” in the title is because the high-art world has been stuck in a rut for over a century. My lecture on that theme at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires:

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