Why the Turner prize shortlist is a cultural barometer of our political times
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Friday, April 28, 2023
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The 2023 Turner prize shortlist has been announced featuring British artists Jesse Darling, Rory Pilgrim, Ghislaine Leung and Barbara Walker.
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.