We have, I fear, been neglecting the arts and their uplifting tendency. Let’s correct that immediately and thereby better ourselves:
Jesse Darling picked up the prestigious art award and its £25,000 cheque at a ceremony in Eastbourne… He has spoken about being inspired by his view of the effects of austerity, Brexit, and the pandemic… and the “hostile environment” immigration policy.
“I wanted to make a work… about Britain for the British public.”
How kind.
Now feast thine eyes upon it:
I know. You’re positively trembling with aesthetic rapture.
According to the artist, and the Turner Prize judges, what we, the public, need, and indeed deserve, is a seemingly random arrangement of tape, net curtains, and metal crash barriers, thereby conveying “a familiar yet delirious world,” and an allegedly “hostile” immigration policy, while “invoking societal breakdown,” and “unsettling perceived notions of labour, class, Britishness and power.” It’s “bold” and “engaging,” you see. The Telegraph’s art critic, Alastair Sooke, preferred the term “sculpturally compelling.”
And clearly, the stuff of a good day out. Definitely worth the bus fare.
Sharp-eyed readers may notice another possible reason for the artist’s gushing reception among our betters. The artist’s identity, or pretend-identity, being so terribly in right now, and by default deserving.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding that allegedly “hostile” immigration policy, the number of net legal migrants for the past year has been the highest recorded, several times the level of three years ago, and is somewhere around 700,000. This figure is likely to be revised upwards, of course, as with previous years’ figures on immigration.
700,000 is equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, by the way.
But hey, let’s ignore such minor details and defer instead to our artistic Brahmin, all busy telling us how it is.
We’re told by Katie Razzall, the BBC’s culture editor, that the prize-winning art, or pretend-art, “tackles nationhood and British identity,” and that the offering is “a cut above” the other entries. It is, says the BBC’s arts reporter Ian Youngs, “making a comment on modern British life.”
The chair of the judges, Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, added that his art was “bold,” “engaging,” and partly a reflection on “the state of the nation.” “It’s one element of it, one layer of it… There is some sense, from his point of view, that these are times of crisis.”
Well, it seems to me that if we are in “times of crisis” and civilisational decline – and civilisational dismay – then much of that may be a consequence of the politics and mentality of those who applaud piles of tat as the best that can be done, the peak of human creativity. And who expect the rest of us to pretend along with them.
And because I like to spoil you, here’s another colossal work by the same dysmorphic individual:
What’s wearying is that these things are so numerous and predictable, so uniform, as if the mentally interchangeable peddlers of such things were following the same ideologically acceptable template. The end result being dutifully banal and artless, devoid of any obvious aesthetic, or any discernible skill with tools and materials, and then justified with some equally hackneyed and preposterous political blather.
It is, as they say, all so tiresome.
Oh, it’s a “critique of consumerism,” before you ask.
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