If Everyone Wins the Turner Prize, What Is Lost? Stunned Art Critics Took to Social Media to Debate the Divisive Gesture

The four nominees of the 2019 Turner Prize surprised everyone
watching the ceremony when they accepted the UK’s most prestigious
award as a collective. The morning after, their politically-engaged
gesture of solidarity is proving as divisive as the UK general
election.

Artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and
Tai Shani wrote to the Turner Prize jury asking be considered as a
collective “to make a statement in the name of commonality,
multiplicity and solidarity—in art as in society.” The judges
accepted the artists’ wishes by a unanimous decision. The four
artists have agreed to share the pooled prize money, each receiving
£10,000 ($13,000). Some see the move as radical and timely
while others are more sceptical.

This morning, dealers sent out their congratulatory emails to
share the news of their artists’ wins. In the case of David Zwirner
and Isabella Bortolozzi, the four artists were congratulated,
though the alphabetical order of the names was rearranged to put
their represented artist, Murillo, at the front of the line-up.
Gallery Sfeir-Semler of Beirut congratulated its artist, Abu
Hamdan, spotlighting him as a Turner Prize “co-winner.”

The subversion of the competitive prize has been welcomed by
many in a time of political division and upheaval in Britain, as
Brexit dominates this month’s general election. The artists’
political message, tacitly endorsed by the judges, was not lost on
cultural critics at home and abroad. ” [T]he Turner Prize
forms the government of national unity that the House of Commons
could not realize,” tweeted New York
Times critic Jason Farago, referring to the political
stalemate in Parliament this summer and fall.

It will be not be lost on those familiar with Margate that a
majority in the seaside town on the Kent coast of England voted in
favor of Brexit. The political sympathy of two of the artists was
evident at the ceremony: Murillo wore a “Vote Labour” badge,
and Helen Cammock showed off her “Tories Out” necklace.

Former Turner prize judge and ex-editorial director of
Frieze magazine, Jennifer Higgie, took to Twitter to
voice her support:
“This is great. To paraphrase the late Stuart Morgan, art is not a
horse race,” she wrote. On the other side of the coin, the
Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak, who helped
transform the Turner Prize into a headline-grabbing award back in
the early 1990s, took a very different view. “How silly it has
all become,” he tweeted. Another sceptic,
the art critic JJ Charlesworth, tweeted: “But the prize is
awarded for the best art, not the best politics.”

This is not the first time that a cultural award has opted to
divide a prize among the contenders. This year, the UK’s leading
literary award, the Booker Prize, gave the prize to Margaret Atwood
and Bernardine Evaristo. This prompted Will Gompertz, BBC’s arts
editor who is an ex-Tate senior manager, to suggest that it might
mean that prizes like the Booker and the Turner have reached their
“sell-by date.” Gompertz warns that the jury’s
decision could “complicate matters for future juries, and
possibly, the prize itself.”

Art Review‘s editor-at-large, Oliver Basciano, who is a
former Turner prize judge, tweeted his concern about the award’s
future. Choosing the winner was always secondary to the
shortlisting, he wrote on social media, adding. “But it is
a prize.” He wondered if the 2019 award puts “the whole enterprise
into question.”

Or maybe it is time for awards like the Turner Prize to
reconsider their format. “The Turner has always been premised on
there being a winner. The award garners publicity, feeds the
bookies and, apparently, generates discussion,” writes the
Guardian‘s art critic Adrian Searle. “But
artists whose works and attitudes have nothing to do with one
another are often pitted against one another for no good reason….
It is the beginning of, rather than an end to, the discussion
of this year’s prize. Good for them.”

The post If Everyone Wins the Turner Prize, What Is Lost?
Stunned Art Critics Took to Social Media to Debate the Divisive
Gesture appeared first on artnet News.