How I suffered for art's sake: a Turner Prize juror's experience

The Guardian ^ | Oct. 1, 2006 | Lynn Barber

[Republicanprofessor]

It makes me sad to remember how thrilled I was on 15 April 2005, the day I received a letter from Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, asking me to serve as a juror for the 2006 Turner Prize. I had to read it a dozen times before I could believe it and then I was so pathetically proud I told everyone I knew, even the windowcleaner. Most of my friends laughed their heads off but none of them actually said: 'Don't do it.'

......

On the other hand, I did once see Keanu Reeves in Vyner Street admiring an artwork in the Modern Art gallery, a blue, plastic rectangle, I seem to recall, that looked like a Formica offcut and cost 20 grand. Reeves described it as 'almost Kleinian', which is artspeak for blue.

......

Art dinners are odd affairs, usually held in private rooms of fashionable restaurants, for 30 or 40 people. It is never clear who is paying (though somebody is) or why you are there. Nobody is ever properly introduced, so you spend half the evening trying to work out who everyone is. I probably insulted people left and right by asking if they ran a gallery when they were, say, head of Italy's national museums, but how are you supposed to know that stuff when nobody tells you.

........

I hate to say it, but my year as a Turner juror has seriously dampened, though I hope not extinguished, my enthusiasm for contemporary art. There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can't believe that galleries would show it.

[Bernard Marx]

Not until you're part of the right crowd, you can't. Once you've made the right friends, been to the right parties, and sucked up to the right critics, then your dumpster crap will be 'recognized' as art

And don't forget the cash grants from the National Endowment for the Arts you'll need to establish your "gallery creds." The only bigger con I can think of is human-caused global "warming."

[Richard Axtell]

Hi. Please add me to the Art Ping list. Thanks.

[Dante3]

Wouldn't surprise me.