The Turner Prize this year...

[Big Bad Al]

Am I just a philistine, or are the entries getting more and more crappy each year? look for yourself:

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibiti ... rtlist.htm

This lot makes signs in a shed look clever! I may not know what art is, but I know what's shite! And BOY is this lot shite!

[Tek Roo]

Am I just a philistine, or are the entries getting more and more crappy each year? look for yourself:

Why...it's almost as if they are trying to be lame, instead of achieving lameness through their usual unimaginative egotism!

[LAGtheNoggin]

I don't know... So far they're looking a lot better than Martin Creed's "Don't Worry," (room with a light) and I have to say some do look rather good this year. Catherine Yass's "descent" is rather beautiful if you give it a look, even if it's just simple photography... But Fiona Banner's looks so sucky it hurts x.@

Well, I'm moulding this opinion without having actually gone and seen them, so these aren't exactly the words of the educated... Strange not many people want to go see the exhibition during the week with me, and I'm not risking the weekend there... Ergh... Ho hum...

[JimRob]

Yeah... I think the Turner's doomed to be conceptual from now on (although, really, it's practically impossible to create artwork without some sense of concept). There are usually one or two people each year who manage to employ some skill and aesthetic sensibility while they're expounding their idea. Yass and Gillick seem to be producing things which are enjoyable to experience rather than just coldly 'clever'. Tyson I can't say much about from the photos, but Banner...

My biggest objection to Fiona Banner's is that it's not actually visual art but literature; being written in large pink letters or in sculpted clay isn't essentially any different to putting a poem in a different typeface. And 'the extreme limits of written communication'? Well, that's a) not exactly a new idea (see cummings, Eliot, Coleridge, etc. etc.) b) followed in exactly the wrong direction: the sexual extreme's been so explored, and we're so surrounded by textual sexuality all the time now, that it's almost impossible she's going to push the envelope any further, and c) why would she want to? And the punctuation marks are just asinine.

However, she won't win because there would be widespread rioting if she did; they're more likely to choose someone relatively traditional like Tyson or Gillick. Tyson, I think.

[Big Bad Al]

Conceptual seems to mean today; 'Make any old tat and bolt on a random "meaning" afterwards!' Also, said meaning is normally meaningless... just like the 'art'.

Take Liam Gillick's "Crappy Night-Club Lighting" ... I mean "Coats of Asbestos Spangled With Mica"

"In this work, Gillick encourages us to explore our bodily and intellectual perception of an altered environment."

Yeah, okay!

Call me a philistine, but if I look at this "art" and think "I could do that... Hell I could pull that out of my arse!", then it doesn't deserve

[ZOMBIE USER 5169]

I rather like the full-stops. They look vaguely wierd and ominous, at least the ones in the studio. The explanation of her work seems pretty average Pseuds Corner stuff.

[Tek Roo]

Yeah, the full stops are pretty cool looking on their own, but trying to apply meaning to them is a bit silly.

I have a version of Performance Art which I call Situation Art that I need to find some way to cash in on. My finest work featured me walking two miles up a hill in the rain while carrying a backpack full of Kung Pao Chicken. The Kung Pao was for a luncheon I was providing some of the food for, and I was walking to work because I had dropped the car off at a garage. When I showed up at the office perfectly soaked, my boss asked me why I hadn't called him and asked for a ride. I told him that it woudn't have been art.

Any ideas how I can format this artform such that it can be considered for next year's Turner?

[Gloria]

*cracks up*

[ZOMBIE USER 6611]

And the punctuation marks are just asinine.

I am clearly insufficiently sophisticated to properly appreciate the Turner contestants' work, I guess.

But I thought period pieces were supposed to be charming.

[Big Bad Al]

I am clearly insufficiently sophisticated to properly appreciate the Turner contestants' work, I guess.

Same here too... Assuming "sophisticated" means "recently suffered a massive hard trauma".