Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton

Author:Sarah Thornton [Thornton, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780393071054
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-11-17T08:00:00+00:00

With a week to go before the awards ceremony, Phil Collins hosted a press conference at a shabby gilt-and-mirrors hall in Piccadilly. As part of his piece return of the real, he invited a panel of nine people who had appeared on reality television programs to tell their stories to an audience of journalists, including Lynn Barber. One young man spoke about how humiliated he had been when he went to Ibiza as part of a reality TV competition to see who could date Miriam, only to learn that Miriam was a pre-op transsexual. Barber heckled from the audience: “What did you think you were doing?” Collins, undaunted by her power over his fate, told her to shut up.

After the panelists had spoken, the conference opened up to questions. Collins walked around the room with a cordless microphone in hand, acting the breezy part of a professional talk-show host but intermittently indulging in startlingly “unprofessional” habits. He slumped, looked at his feet, chewed his lip, and scratched his cheek with the mike.

“Nicholas!” he barked, nodding at Nicholas Glass, the arts correspondent for Channel 4 News. Glass asked the group how they felt about being part of an artwork.

“I like to make an exhibition of myself,” answered a woman who had suffered through medical complications on Brand New You, a cosmetic surgery show.

“Art is like having a conversation. This work is very interactive,” said a man who had been blamed for his autistic son’s bad behavior on The Teen Tamer.

“It’s what the Turner Prize is all about,” said the man who had tried to date Miriam.

A TV reporter from Germany had a question for Collins. “Is this project really art?” she asked.

Collins stared into her camera and said, “If this work isn’t art, then I have to ask you, is this news?”

The cameraman swung his head out from behind his equipment. “We can’t use that!” he exclaimed.

Indeed, Collins’s work doesn’t look like art. After the media left, I asked him why. First, he wants his work to “sit close to the thing it is critiquing, so sometimes the aesthetic dimension is willfully pared down.” Second, he asserted that the best works are the ones that least confirm your expectations: “It is amazing when you can’t believe what you are seeing. I hold out for those moments. The unsettling nature of art is, for me, its deepest attraction.”

Three days later, on the Saturday night before the awards ceremony, Channel 4 broadcast The Turner Prize Challenge, a half-hour reality TV program produced by the Tate, in which four contestants—two students, one accountant, and an art teacher—competed against one another to explain the work of the four nominated artists to the general public. The contestants had been winnowed from several hundred “screen tests”—videotaped comments that visitors had made in the Turner Prize Video Booth at the museum. (The Tate sees itself as a “content-rich organization.” It has a comprehensive media facility, with in-house editing suites and camera crews who are “out shooting all the time.

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