The Turner Prize at 40: should we just put it out of its misery?

Anyone wanting to understand how an award for achievement among Britain’s senior artists came to be one of the most divisive, yet bracingly entertaining cultural phenomena ever to raise the collective temperature of the British public should glance through the list of winners and nominees over the 40 years of the Turner Prize’s existence. They’ll find it a sobering read.

Founded in 1984 as the kind of niche professional award that was about as exciting to the general public as, say, the annual medal of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the Turner Prize relaunched in 1991 with an upper age limit of 50. The revamped version implicitly championed youth, at the precise moment when a generation of radical young artists were turning the staid British art world on its head, and massively expanding the audience for contemporary art. Millions tuned in for the annual televised awards ceremony, with its parade of transgressive era-defining YBA works: Hirst’s dead shark, Emin’s unmade bed, Creed’s lights going on and off. Whether this mass audience was cheering or sneering at the new, globally transcendent British art, they were at least talking about it – and how! Never mind art as the new rock’n’roll, this was football.

Or that certainly is the Turner Prize myth as it’s cherished in the collective memory – as much by those who affected to despise it, as those with a vested interest in loving it. A scan through those winners and nominees, however, gives a more prosaic impression of the glory days of Britain’s “most controversial art prize”. Far from being a two-decade-long orgy of YBA outrage, a rolling showcase for the art that made Britain groovy again, and saw London briefly dubbed the new global art capital, what we get is a stolid rollcall of the best-known names of the nineties and early noughties: Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller, Grayson Perry. Who else could have won Britain’s biggest art prize during this period? Well, only the large numbers of artists, as many as a third – among winners as well as nominees – you probably won’t have heard of. For all I know Martin Boyce (winner 2011), Susan Philipsz (2010) and Richard Wright (2009) could be opening huge retrospectives in Shanghai, Buenos Aires or Chicago as we speak, but it’s a long time since they disturbed Britain’s headline writers. The Turner Prize annals are a chastening reminder of how much art, of any period, is forgotten almost as soon as it’s been declared important.

The YBAs, meanwhile, who define most people’s idea of Turner Prize Art – or Turner Prize Bollocks (in terms of mass impact the distinction barely matters) – scarcely feature. Of the core group only Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing won, in 1995 and 1997 respectively. Emin, whose My Bed is for many the greatest of all Turner Prize works was pipped to the post by Steve McQueen in 1999, the Chapman Brothers by Grayson Perry in 2003.

So does that mean that the whole Turner Prize thing was just a myth, a collective hallucination – even a delusion – a media-generated charade that was briefly entertaining, but dissolved into thin air the moment the zeitgeist moved on? Actually, not at all. If enough people see the hallucination, get caught up in the spectacle, feel the excitement – even if it’s the excitement of denigration – that cannot but be significant.

The moment at the 1992 ceremony, when the now near-forgotten Grenville Davey took the prize, and Janet Street-Porter, buttonholed for an opinion, turned to the camera with a testy, “Damien Hirst shoulda won,” is in retrospect a defining incident in British culture. You could practically hear the millions of jaws dropping all over Britain, as two questions hit the mass consciousness: ‘How could anyone so gracelessly dismiss the actual winner?’ and ‘Who the hell is Damien Hirst?’ That barely-a-sentence sound-bite feels in retrospect like the beginning of a journey for the British public, into new and unimaginable forms of art, and by extension new and unimaginable forms of being British – for good or ill. The fact that the majority of viewers likely thought ill is actually the point.

That journey might be said to have been bookended by the moment nine years later, when Madonna – then the most famous woman in the world – presented Martin Creed with the 2001 Turner Prize for his Work No. 227: The Lights Going on and Off – essentially a room full of air – with the words “Right on motherfuckers, everyone is a winner”. Retired colonels all over the country (or those still standing) spluttered into their sherry. But it was as though some barrier in consciousness had been passed through over the intervening period. Anyone capable of understanding that an empty room could be art had by this point got the message.

The fact that these two defining moments were televisual is of course highly significant. Television, fuelled in advance by tabloids and broadsheets, was the medium through which the vast majority participated in the great Turner Prize spectacle. And there was something quintessentially, indeed reassuringly British in the slightly scuzzy razzamatazz that went with it: the rowdy hooting from the floor when the winner was announced; the obligatory ‘demonstration’ by the Turner’s very own opposition movement, the Stuckists; the sense of all the estates of British society watching each other – “ordinary people” seeing the chattering classes make fools of themselves; the middle-class basking in their own tolerance, with the added thrill that they were still in all probability being conned.

The Turner Prize as millions loved and hated it was a product of the heroic age of mass TV viewing. The early Thatcher years, when the award was created, saw a surge of interest in the ‘business’ of culture, with large TV audiences for niche awards ceremonies such as the Booker. But the novelty of being ‘allowed’ to watch important people at glitzy dinners had dissipated long before the TV audience fragmented onto endless online platforms. The Turner Prize ceremony is still televised (you may be surprised to learn), but in the relative graveyard territory of BBC News, and like so much about today’s Turner it’s the palest ghost of the peak period incarnation.

Provocation – or at least the illusion of ‘outrage’ – that other great pillar of the Turner also isn’t what it was. It says a lot about the general state of awareness of contemporary art around the turn of the millennium that the new British art was trumpeted by the broadsheet press in terms of ‘newness’ and ‘originality’, while the artists themselves would have been the first to admit that much of it was a brasher repackaging of longstanding tropes from American and European conceptual art. The tabloids revived hoary anti-modern sloganeering of the fraudulence/obscenity/waste of money ilk, boosting the Turner’s viewing figures and the artist’s prices.

But by 2001, the great ‘empty room’ year, the consensus had broadly caught up with the cutting edge. As late as 2016, my then editors at the Daily Telegraph were still trying to whip up a storm in a teacup around a shortlist including a ‘choo-choo train’ and a nightclub entrance formed from gigantic thighs and buttocks, but with the expectation that the reaction, even in the Tory heartland, would be an affectionate chuckle rather than a howl of derision.

With so many of its key premises fatally undermined, the awards organisers at Tate Britain (and we haven’t had time to even start on the Turner’s role in the optimisation of the Tate brand), embarked on a series of modifications to its once world-beating format that may be regarded as brave attempts to adapt to changing global realities or as painful self-sabotaging.

In 2017, the rule barring artists over 50 was relaxed, with the result that the prize immediately reverted to what the 1991 ruling had been designed to avoid – an award for “lifetime achievement” – when it was won by Lubaina Himid, substantially on the basis of a work from 1983. The strong showing of veteran Black women artists in subsequent shortlists is ostensibly designed to right the wrongs of a history in which such artists have been ignored, but smacks more of addressing the professional anxieties of white curators than the complex realities of Black Britain today.

Even more grievous, in 2019 the organisers allowed the four shortlisted artists – Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani – to form a collective “in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity” to which the prize would inevitably be given.

If that didn’t feel like such a heinous idea in isolation, it fatally undermined the competitive principle of the er, competition.

As I said in a comment in the Independent at the time, not only had the public been deprived of the “agony and ecstasy of a good old-fashioned awards ceremony”, but “the opportunity to assess how effectively this year’s shortlisted artists have addressed the ‘urgent social and political causes’ of our time had been lamentably passed up.”

Those social and political causes have become vastly more urgent over the intervening five years (feels like a lifetime), but the Turner’s attempts to keep in step have felt increasingly feeble: responding to the lockdown idea of a more caring, sharing future with a shortlist of (mostly lame) collectives in 2021; an all-women/non-binary shortlist in 2022 – not such a big deal when the first all women shortlist came in 1997. This year’s shortlist of entirely non-white artists feels like a gesture which, like all too many in today’s art scene, would have made more sense ten or 20 years ago.

If the divisiveness and one-upmanship of the traditional competition don’t fit with the era of inclusivity and diversity, nor do the kind of big personality artists who illuminated the heyday of the Turner. It’s not just that Damien, Tracy and co are more out of fashion than they’ve ever been, but the typical artist of today is a meek and curiously anonymous figure, who far from wanting to smash down the walls of the Academy or just bust their way into one of the big galleries (in the manner of the YBAs) is content to wait for the attention of an art world – composed of curators, dealers, museums and the banks who pay for the whole thing – in which the artist, as one of Britain’s senior artists put it to me recently, is “the least important element”.

In that sense, the Turner can hardly be accused of not reflecting the tenor of the times. It is good, to be fair, that the award focuses substantially on little-known artists, but the last two shortlists have had a callow, tentative quality on the part of both artists’ and selectors’ contributions, to which the public has responded largely with indifference.

So should the Turner Prize be put out of its misery? I don’t think so. There’s little enough of a centre or focus in today’s art scene to make the sudden absence of this once vital institution a major loss. The Turner’s avowed aim is “to promote public debate about new developments in contemporary British art”. Museum exhibitions, art fairs and, on a global level, even the Venice Biennale with its supposedly era-defining curated exhibitions don’t offer that because they don’t provide the role for the viewer which is explicit in the Turner Prize’s remit.

The Turner Prize reframed its function in 1991. It modified that in 2017. It now needs to relaunch with a more trenchant premise that will help it regain its edge, and fulfil its crucial “public debate” function far more dynamically than it does now. And the competitive aspect shouldn’t be neglected. It may not matter in reality which of four artists is “best” (though it kind of does when there’s £40K involved), but framing the criteria that would allow you to come to such a conclusion, while understanding the social and political forces acting on you as you make it, is an essential exercise, not just for art prize judges and professional critics, but for anyone walking into an art gallery.