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Minister: Turner art 'bulls**t'
LONDON, England -- Britain's culture minister Kim Howells has branded this year's four shortlisted entries in the prestigious Turner Prize as "bulls**t." Howells left his "plain speaking" response to the entries on a signed comment card pegged to the wall at Tate Britain, London, site of the Turner exhibition. The card said: "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bulls**t." The former art student defended his blunt language as the "sort of plain speaking that is always missing from discussions about art in this country." He said: "I feel very passionate about art, it has always been very central to my life and I was so disappointed when I saw that exhibition. "It infuriated me, I mean apart from the language it infuriated me. That is not artistic." Howells, who studied art between 1965 and 1969, said he was "very well aware of the flows and balances of art and the art establishment." It was "the great judges and arbiters of taste (who) are completely out of touch with what art should be about. "I can hardly think of a work of art that has been produced over the last couple of decades that has any kind of purchase on the public consciousness. "We need to be more passionate about things like art and film and so on because that is what history remembers civilisations by -- not by who was a good accountant but by who was a good artist."
The four short-listed pieces of art are competing for the £20,000 ($31,000) first prize. They include Fiona Banner's "Arsewoman In Wonderland," an explicit description of a pornographic film written in pink lettering on a giant billboard, and Liam Gillick's "Perspex," a sheet of plastic suspended from a ceiling. (Full Story) The other two are Catherine Yass's videos, including one shot from a remote-controlled helicopter, and Keith Tyson's octagonal monolithic block with computer parts inside called "The Thinker (After Rodin)." Exhibition curator Katharine Stout said Banner had made "one of the most significant contributions to British art in the past year." The annual prize has regularly attracted criticism for focusing on the unconventional. Entries in recent years have included a soiled bed, a pickled cow and an elephant dung painting.
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