The decision to award all four nominated artists for this year’s Turner Prize was made not by the judges, as was the case with the Booker Prize that was divvied up between Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, but by the artists themselves. It was a “collective statement,” they said this week on going up on stage together to receive the prize.
They elaborated as follows. The quartet believed that their artistic practices were “incompatible with the competition format, whose tendency is to divide and to individualise”.
The nominated artists had written to the judging panel beforehand with a plea for the prize to be shared as a statement of “commonality, multiplicity and solidarity” at a time of “political crisis”.
The jury responded: “Their symbolic act reflects the political and social poetics that we admire and value in their work.”
To be clear, literary and artistic prizes are a load of hokum – Julian Barnes won the Booker for arguably his worst novel The Sense of an Ending. The Turner Prize has been awarded to some absolutely bizarre efforts in recent years.
If the four artists had released a statement rubbishing artistic prizes tout court (“who cares what a bunch of snotty big wigs think?”), then wouldn’t that have been refreshing. But no, they intend to share the prize money between them.
Writer Musa Okwanga welcomed the news, writing on Twitter: “I am glad that the Turner prize was shared. At its core, art is not sport… That is why artistic communities provide better opposition to nationalism than sporting ones.”
Since when were artistic communities somehow nicer than any other? Great artists often despise each other. Verlaine shot Rimbaud, once best friends and lovers. Joni Mitchell once rather gloriously described Madonna in these terms: “Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.” Norman Mailer punched Gore Vidal.
A kinder interpretation seems to me that the winners were attempting to say, admittedly in frustratingly mangled terms, that art can help us deal with troubling times.
That is a non-controversial statement. For example, towards the end of his life, Stefan Zweig discovered Montaigne’s essais and found his writing a great consolation in the “mass cataclysm”, as he described it, of the early 20th century. Living in the era of the devastating Wars of Religion, or “this bedlam” as Montaigne described it in 1588 towards the end of his life, Montaigne embarked on a project to delve into all his experience, covering a vast swathe of human life, the body, sex, food, music, his friendships, to work out how to live a better, more authentic life.
Zweig found solace in the philosopher’s emphasis on the interior self set against a world in turmoil: “When I pick up the Essais, the printed paper dissolves in the half-light of the room. Someone breathes, someone lives in me, a stranger has approached me, and now he is no longer a stranger, but an intimate.”
But the Turner winners explicitly deny that their art has much in common, beyond a vague notion of “multiplicity”: “The politics we deal with differ greatly, and for it would feel problematic if they were pitted against each other, with the implication that one was more important, significant or more worthy of attention than the others.”
The reasoning then amounts to this: that the judgement about whether one contribution is better than the other in some way follows on from the macro-level political developments of our time – “capitalism”, “climate chaos”, the tendency to “divide and to individualise”. This is a bogus reversal of the whole project that underpins the best way to combat bad ideas and the world’s evils.
The ability to choose, to judge and to subject ourselves to self-criticism are hallmarks of civilisation. Banal ideas make a bad world even worse. We owe it to ourselves and to the future to test our cultural artefacts against the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of others. And to do so, we must accept artistic standards that go beyond the present, beyond fashion, beyond the vogue for “commonality” or “multiplicity”.