Art News: Something Stinks at Turner Prize, Judge Says

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LONDON, Oct. 3, 2006The art vying for this years Turner Prize stinks, according to Lynn Barber, a journalist and celebrity interviewer who agreed to be the one lay member of the jury for this year's contest. 

Barber said she was almost driven out of her mind by the quantity of bad and banal contemporary art that she had to judge, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Barber also claimed that the nominations that members of the public were invited to send in were ignored by the prizes organizers.

The jury-room confessions, unheard of in the 22-year history of the prize, are likely to vindicate critics who say the £25,000 prize could be renamed the Emperor's New Clothes Prize.

There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can't believe galleries would show it, Barber said, adding that she thinks organizers interest in Turner nominations made by the public is a pretense.

She said she wrote in her diary: For the first time I find myself seriously wondering: Is it all a fix? After six months in the art world I feel thoroughly demoralized, disillusioned and full of dark fears that I have been stitched upthat actually the art world has already decided who will win the 2006 Turner Prize.

The quirky pieces by the four finalists announced yesterday for the 2006 prize include:
 
* glass boxes full of fluff, twigs and other garbage, alongside lumpy clay statues, by Rebecca Warren;

* a large room by Phil Collins that looks exactly like an office, where three or four people interview former reality show contestants;

* a New Age science project by Mark Titchner in which radiophonic boxes are wired up to a richly decorated structure that looks halfway between a pulpit and a Victorian shower cubicle (members of the public stand inside this and gaze across the room at some spinning nausea-inducing stripy discs while hearing a distant hum);

* and, perhaps least controversially, abstract paintings by Tomma Abts.

Daily Telegraph: Have I Been Stitched Up, Asks Turner Prize Judge