Begging Important Questions

To be an art critic nowadays, you’ve really got to master the language. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times clearly deserves her position. On the Turner Prize:

This obvious ridiculousness is part of each project’s pleasure. But it is also an important part of their point. To labour one’s way on some improvised electric bicycle whose only by-product is water across a baking desert and then use the collected waste to paint a picture of the supremely efficient cactus, is to point out a ludicrous gap between human effort and natural simplicity. This is more than an absurdly convoluted demonstration of futility. It begs important questions about the ways that we negotiate our planet.

A series of platinum prints showing the vast quantities of ore mined to produce five little images illustrates the gross disparity between a production process and its end product. And is this really so odd, in a week when the world’s largest artificial ski slope, complete with tons of manufactured “snow”, has just opened in the desert state of Dubai?

Art nowadays, eh? If it doesn’t subvert our preconceptions, then you can be pretty sure it’s begging important questions. I would suggest that for the overwhelming majority of people, the important questions raised by these artworks aren’t about the way we negotiate our planet, but concern the way a self-selecting group of subsidised artists make a living. As for “the gross disparity between a production process and its end product”, why should artists be exempt here? I’d imagine the resources and finance involved in the construction, presentation and promotion of the Turner Prize exhibits are pretty comparable with the costs of constructing the ski slope in Dubai. At least in Dubai they’ve got a ski slope to show for it at the end. All we get is a bunch of self-righteous people feeling pleased with themselves.

Starling’s work has a visionary quality. He stands as an inheritor of the cranky but quintessentially British tradition of William Blake or Samuel Palmer — or maybe even James Bond. At his most ambitious, he entwines complex ideas with a sharp political point.

All this, from a shed?

The artist has said that his works are “the physical manifestation of my thought process”. Tate curators hailed the shed as “poetic . . . a buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism”. They added: “For each project, he has learnt particular skills — model-making, boat-building, engineering … but always stopping short of complete mastery. We can sense, in the visible fissures and joins of his works, the signs of a paradoxical ‘amateur professionalism’.”

I can sense, in the visible fissures and joins of his works, the signs of a complete…

Ah, what’s the point?