Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

David Lister the British Arts Editor for The Independent and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, has published an article in The Independent titled ‘The Turner Prize and its judges have painted themselves into a corner’. Lister states “I have never fully “got” the Turner Prize. This week, as every year, it certainly made a stir and found an interesting winner in Elizabeth Price, a 45-year-old video artist formerly of the eighties pop band Talulah Gosh (I must have been washing my hair during their 15 minutes of fame, because I can’t recall them at all). But with or without memories of Talulah Gosh, the Turner Prize, presented by the statutory celebrity, this year Jude Law, proved again one of the biggest and glitziest events in the arts calendar. …It has a mission. Other arts awards don’t. The Oscars and Baftas don’t have a stated purpose to encourage people to debate and love film. The Comedy Awards don’t solemnly claim that their objective is to get the populace discussing what makes them laugh. But the Turner Prize comes with a mission statement. It professes that it is, “intended to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art”. …two of the four on this year’s shortlist were video artists, the third was a performance artist, and the fourth an artist who drew with a hint of excrement. There was no painter. I suspect that there is still puzzlement in public understanding about video art, just as I suspect there is still puzzlement over why painting is the poor relation in contemporary art. How helpful it would have been this week if the chair of the Turner Prize judges, Penelope Curtis, the head of Tate Britain, had “promoted public discussion of new developments in contemporary art” by addressing that publicly. Is there a crisis in British painting, Penelope? Does that make you sad, as the head of one of the most famous homes of painting in the world? Sure, let’s have the parties, and the prizes presented by actors. But let’s have the real discussion too. Remember that mission statement.”

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Elizabeth Price the 46 year old British artist and former member of indie pop bands having been awarded the Turner Prize for her video trilogy, the first video artist to win for over a decade. The jury “admired the seductive and immersive qualities of Price’s video trilogy, which reflects the ambition that has characterised her work in recent years. They were impressed by the way Price creates a rhythmic and ritualistic experience through her film installations combining different materials and technical vocabularies from archival footage and popular music videos to advertising.” Charlotte Higgins in a Guardian article states “Were she starting out now, her career in art – one that has just been crowned by her winning this year’s Turner prize – would be impossible, Elizabeth Price has said. The artist, who was awarded the £25,000 prize on Monday, criticised the government’s introduction of the Ebacc qualification in schools. …Price, who attended a comprehensive school in Luton before studying art at the University of Oxford, where she also now teaches, criticised the withdrawal of state funding for humanities and arts at universities. The result, she said, is that “these will become the subjects of the privileged, and history-writing and novel-writing and art-making and poetry-writing will become homogenous in terms of class and social background”. Her career – making video art whose value in the commercial world is insufficient to support her – has been possible only because of publicly funded arts institutions, she said. “If you look at my CV, just about everything I have done has come through a publicly funded institution; it is a career entirely built on that sort of support.” It would never have happened without the “generous opportunities I’ve had through education and public funding”.

Inspired by Charlotte Higgins ow.ly/g205S image source deskarati ow.ly/g20A0