TPT might mean Trailer Park Trash or even Tara Palmer-Tomkinson as she looks better at the head of this post but today it stands for Turner Prize Time.
I expect you think that a conservative like me will ridicule this year’s pile of pennies or the giant backside and you are right that I don’t regard either as outstanding works of art or even works of art. But I am not going to condemn them … just in case.
The Turner Prize started in 1984 and this is its 32nd year (there was no prize in 1990). Look back at the winners in the early days, when it was just as controversial, and many of them are household names. Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert and George, Tony Cragg, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst were all winners by 1995. Richard Long’s work I particularly admire. Since then the only winners I have heard of are Steve McQueen (1999) and Grayson Perry (2003). No, not that Steve McQueen, the one who directs films like 12 Years a Slave. And don’t be put off by Grayson dressing up as a girl; his ceramics are created with a high degree of skill. It seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible, that our opinion of this year’s winner will change with the benefit of hindsight.
The prize has one restriction that I’m surprised hasn’t been lifted. Entrants have to be under fifty. The original BP portrait competition at the National Portrait Gallery was for artists under forty but this was scrapped years ago. Anyway it’s vexing to be excluded just when I have time on my hands and an excellent entry. What do you think?
It is an up to date, colourful and ecological sculpture based on an idea by TS Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
For I have known them all already, known them all –
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
There are 154 used Nespresso capsules that represent the price of coffee in cents/lb this week. I hope Tate Modern will have room for it in their new extension. It’s rather empty I hear.
