WHY WON’T CRITICS ADMIT TURNER PRIZE IS RUBBISH?

THE annual £ 25,000 Turner Prize was set up to ‘widen interest’ in contemporary art and reward ‘a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or presentation’.

It was supposedly the ultimate manifestation of State Art, the government acting as a patron of the arts in an attempt to enrich all our lives.

Yet every year, it has brought us a parade of artistic incompetence, obscenity and trash. State Art pushed the new, the minimalist, the puerile and plain nasty. It may have begun with a pile of bricks, but it soon became pickled sharks, an unmade bed, mounds of cigarette ends and heroin needles.

The artists strained for controversy — and the more we reactionaries said the Turner was rubbish, the happier they claimed to be. Yet they were damaging our body politic.

The Turner Prize merely cemented, in the public’s

mind, an impression that State Art lived in a privileged world of its own, where a male potter became famous chiefly for dressing as a woman and where Damien Hirst became a multi-millionaire even though some of his ideas were second-hand and the work was done by helpers.

Lay people looked at the sort of rubbish that won this coveted prize and thought ‘we know more than the experts’.

Unenthused by contemporary art, but their preferences ignored, they were simply reinforced in their suspicion that the Establishment was taking the mickey.

Politicians could have intervened, saying: ‘ This is disgusting and a waste of hardearned money,’ but they lacked the guts to do so.

They continue to go along with this con because they want an easy life and they know that a whingeing art establishment will be given a sympathetic hearing by the BBC.

The oddest thing about State Art is not that it is so bad. It is that it is tolerated by so many professional critics.

Broadcasters are absurdly respectful: that windy head-wobbler Simon Schama droned on about Hirst’s pickled mutton having an ‘ancient, perfervid religiosity’ owing to evocations of biblical sheep sacrifice.

When the BBC’s Will Gompertz talks about contemporary art, where is the scepticism? Would listeners and viewers not thank him for occasionally laughing his teeth off and admitting that it is all a load of rubbish?