Why the Turner prize shortlist is a cultural barometer of our political times

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The 2023 Turner prize shortlist has been announced featuring British artists Jesse Darling, Rory Pilgrim, Ghislaine Leung and Barbara Walker.

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The ConversationThe Conversation
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https://theconversation.com/why-the-turner-prize-shortlist-is-a-cultural-barometer-of-our-political-times-204589https://theconversation.com/why-the-turner-prize-shortlist-is-a-cultural-barometer-of-our-political-times-204589
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Friday, April 28, 2023
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Tate Britain, State Britain, Saatchi, Young British Artists, Assemble, Housing, Freedom, Channel 4, Violence, Exhibition, Hip, Education, Bed, Culture, Parliament Square, Politics, Jeremy Corbyn, Channel, Research, YBAS, History, Movement, Shark, Parliament, Veronica, Stasis, Damien Hirst, Collective bargaining, Crash, Labour Party, Hope, Time, Colonialism, Racism, History of the Labour Party (UK), Efficiency, Ageing, New Labour, Ownership, Turner Prize, PR, Football, Black Lives Matter, Interior design, Management, Video game, Turner, Britpop, Thatcherism
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Summary
Key Points: 
  • The 2023 Turner prize shortlist has been announced featuring British artists Jesse Darling, Rory Pilgrim, Ghislaine Leung and Barbara Walker.
  • With a whirlwind 40-year socio-political history this lens can be applied to the prize.

From Thatcher’s 1980s to Channel 4’s 1990s

    • Things changed in 1991 with Channel 4 as a hip new sponsor and a ban on artists over 50.
    • The prize would raise interest in a newly youthful, increasingly fashionable area of UK culture.
    • The 1990s prizes are remembered for Young British Art.
    • The televised celebrity-strewn Channel 4 under 50s version of the Turner prize was part of this – feeding the feel-good 1990s vibes, fuelled by PR and underwritten by a debt-driven boom.

2000’s third way

    • Some of the tax income from a seemingly buoyant economy was spent on the arts, which were newly redefined as consumer services and required to prove value and efficiency using metrics.
    • Titled State Britain, it was created when Tony Blair passed a law to make it illegal to protest within a mile of Parliament.
    • Positioned across the perimeter of the one mile from Parliament no-protest-zone, it probed a line between art and politics.

2008’s financial crash and a new outlook

    • Shortlisted Turner prize art from that time didn’t say much about austerity or that moment, instead looking a lot like the art of the early 2000s.
    • Anti-austerity movements found a home alongside trade unions in a Labour Party reimagined under the radically social democratic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
    • Lubaina Himid, aged 62, was named winner in 2017, after the Turner prize age cap was dropped.
    • By implication, the work conveys something about the failure of institutions to provide either basic support or transformative change.
    • Hope is found instead in a politics of community and care, vulnerability and interconnection, which offers occasional glimpses of better worlds.
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