Art Attack!!

Yes, I know. The post title is a rip off of that CITV show with Neil 'Number 73' Bucahnan. It's been a fortnight of pointless award ceremonies, with more to come. Firstly, I was at the Q Awards, then the Man Booker Prize, rooting for the Zadie Smith book to fail (and fail it did). But coming up soon is that infamous prize, that so called contraversial event in the art world known as the Turner Prize. Part of me wants to be there to insult the artists and judges intelligence and judgement, and the other part of me wishes to be there so I could present the prize, with the opporuntity to precede it with my speech.

I was once invited to sit on the panel once but was unable to as I was in hospital at the time, having my stomach pumped, and ever since then, my open-minded approach and expectations of the arts has been tested and disappointed. But if they were to invite me to make a speech, this would be the speech I would give.

My Turner Prize Speech by Smirnov Kool age thirtyish.

I've always had an ambivalent relationship with art. I was never any good at drawing, and I wasn't old enough to understand that the concept of 'art' was a very broad, if not limitless concept that could justify just about anything. My understanding of art as a kid were a number of things; Paint Along With Nancy, Take Hart, Hart Beat with Tony Hart, Rolf's Cartoon Club and my experiences of art at school. I enjoyed Rolf Harris' and Tony Hart's art can be fun approach, even though I wasn't technically good enough to create anything remotely worthy of being featured on the gallery. Meanwhile at school, my experience of art was in part tainted by the teachers. In my secondary school a teacher called Mrs Calaghan (who we called chameleon because she kept going red in the face) was a miserable cow who just had us drawing crappy things placed in front of us, but she just bored us shitless and her apathy at the school rubbed off on us. The most interesting thing that year in the art class was the dare for my friend Tony, to drink a mouthful of wood glue, for a laugh. As I got older I eventually developed an appreication for the impressionists, expressionists, then the pop artists, the cubists, surrealists, the dadaists and contstructivits et al. My own personal favourites include Kandinsky, Kokoscka, Hopper, Rothko, Caulfield, but I have a problem with a lot of modern art, particularly modern british art. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places. Maybe the wrong places and institutions have misguided me, like the Turner Prize for example. Let's just nail a few things.

Rachel Whitebread
The K Foundation got it right in 1993 when they awarded her the 'anti-turner prize' award of £40.000 as the worst artist in Britain. Ironically she was also the winner of the actual predictable farce which IS the Turner Prize. Although her recent installation of white boxes arranged in any old way doesn't feature in the 2005 award, it still continues to invite not the sense of awe as it should but complete and utter stony faced indifference.

Tracey Emin
Her 1999 infamous blag, My Bed, emodies the idea as with Emin herself, the stereotype that most artists are self-obsessed. They might tell you that this is just introspection but it isn't, not when they are selfish enough to expect others to believe that we are actually interested in their vain and shallow lives, their pathetic and embarassing offerings. Would it mean the same if their work was actually, (maybe an outdated idea perhaps) presented in a technically high standard, both aethetically and creatively? Again far from displaying anything enlightning, shocking or intriguing about the human condition, it just bores me. Is it Arts perogative to be boring? Are her naked pics more interesting than her piss-discharge stained bed? Why is my dirty bed not an art work? I feel it would have more to say about contemporary life, than Emin's own self-soaked world. Maybe I misunderstood her motives as a cry for affection and love. Maybe I took he piece as just artifice, which I had every reason to believe it was. But none of this is interesting.

Martin Creed
Perhaps a more contraversial winner than Tracey Emin. No, definately more contraversial. Emin's work had some effort and content, this piece that won in 2000, The Lights Going on and Off, which was just that, is a big lazy pile of shit, not just a ploy to display the fraud that is modern art, but this being the case the joke is also on the judging panel for displaying their ignorance that would both thrill and annoy Duchamp.

Charles Saatchi
Most Saatchi's are twats, the world would be a better place without them, at least our London based one's would. It's difficult to tell if he is Brit Arts biggest saviour, benefactor, or gullible godfather. What is clear, is that this art dunce, has made no secret of his naviety when it comes to recognising good art from the emperor's new clothes. Also the Saatchi building is a monstrousity of architecture that deserves to be pulled down, or punctured by an aeroplane, and like the other attention seekers, that his known as the art world, his significance should be recognised for what it is-complete bullshit.

Turner Prize
Difficult to know who needs to be stabbed, the judges, the artists? What's the harm, it's just fun, it's only an annual pantomime, something to take the kids to, hardly a breeding ground for the Bacons, Monet's of the future. Does the art world really give this horror show credibility? Does great art really divide the public or is this just a purely manufactured truism that sounds good when said at parties? This year, there's a bird obsessed with her arse. Nothing wrong with that but why does she feel we should be interested in HER ARSE when they are far more superior, ugly and ordinary arses out there!? And there's a piece by some bloke (I really cannot be arsed checking his name) who's produced an installation which is a old shed, called something like shed, boat, shed again. It comes from the same school of art technique as Martin Creed, you know, the famous, long established tradition of HAVING NO IDEAS.

As I've said I appreciate a lot of modern art, I'm surprised that this prize only seems to focus on the more negative aspects. But art isn't merely about raising questions. This justification doesn't wash for decades. Art should be brave enough to take the lead and answer questions or offer alternative theories or suggestions. All this, 'this piece confronts us,' or 'whatever experience, history the viewer brings' is bullshit and anyone in the trade will tell you that. Of course it doens't have to meet an agenda or follow a paint by munbers approach and there's no subject that cannot be captured. I particularly liked thr Myra Hindly portrait with kids hand prints, now that was brave amd what you might call daring, but not particularly shocking. Technically it achieved something. Is it too much to ask, however, to be artistic, not to produce an object of mediocirty, something can be insprational? In the last week Bansky has achieved more in his recent exhibition than the Turner prize winners of the last 14 years.

But what is it about modern art that is meant to be particularly daring? You couldn't be daring if you made a life-sized replica of Thatcher made from the colelctive shit of the royal family, collected by aides, and delivered the sculpture with your mate dressed as the twin towers. Someone tell me what's daring because I feel nothing but a mixture of indifference with disappointed. The only link to daring I can find evidence of is like a sleeping David Beckham piece or something by Wolfgang Tilmans, and all of the artists above, the dare to be mediorce, the dare to take the piss, the dare to produce something that says nothing, that challenges nothing, the dare to expose themselves, the dare to appear to be minimal and cool, the dare to be an elitist, the dare to have nothing to offer, the dare to leave the viewer feeling empty, the dare to watse their lives, the dare to express their ignorance about issues that affect them, their world and their place in it, the dare to be trivial. Why, when anything can be done in the name of art, when the world is your pallette, for fuck's sake, why ask someone to give a shit about a ballsed up shitty shack that doesn't know or care whether it's a fucking boat?

There was a time when Fritz and I found oursleves sucked in by these kind of cynical people, and their lifestyle, and that was a particulary cynical time of our lives when we expected our excess and lazy partying and shopping to kill us before we were 25. It's only looking back that I realise that all these stypes, who presented themselves as so liberial, multi-cultural and were going to change the world, smash it to pieces and reassemble itself and start again, were actually the most bland and conservative people you would ever meet. They talked about a lot of things and only did 1% of them because 99% of the time they failed or were too lazy or hungover to get out of there beds. All this 'look at us, were all outsiders, but some of us, are even further adrift..' mantra was total bollocks. This lot wouldn't know art if Daniel Libeskind ran up to them and put a crystal spire through their collective chests and twisted it...twisted it.