Is This Art?

So it’s that time of year again. The time for someone’s leftovers to be brandished in front of a bewildered public who scoff with disbelief as yet another clump of dross sits piled together in the Tate Modern. Yes, this is annual incomprehension of the Turner Prize.

For many people the Turner Prize brings back painful memories of Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’, which was nominated in 1999. The famously unmade bed apparently graphically illustrated “themes of loss, sickness, fertility, copulation, conception and death”. No, actually it didn’t. It graphically illustrated that Tracey Emin is incredibly lazy, and that the curator of the Tate Modern never read The Emperor’s New Clothes. Either that or the Tate modern needs to look for a new maid.

Luckily however, this year we have two entries to buck the recent trend of absurd ideas:
‘If I Had You’ by Darren Almond is comprised of four home movies showing his grandmother. No, really, that’s what it is. Honestly. Quite how this belongs in an art gallery is a mystery. The only logical conclusion is that he wanted the address for ‘You’ve Been Framed!’ when he asked who was stupid enough to pay him for his home movies.

The other saviour of modern art for this year is Simon Starling, who quite brilliantly turned a shed into a boat and then turned the boat into a shed. Assuming he’s not just made the whole thing up, the poor man apparently needed a boat so badly that he resorted to making a boat from a shed. Then, through a cruel twist of fate, he needed his shed back and was forced rebuild it!
What a terrible shame!

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