Nice Work if you can get it - a small investment
for Christmas and you're odds-on for next
year's £25,000 handout
DIY quips ahoy. For the Telegraph, Simon Starling's victory last night "may at least do something to promote the ancient craft of carpentry". According to the Times, "critics [by which is meant some people waving placards outside] mocked the Turner, saying it should be renamed the B&Q do-it-yourself prize". Metro, ever-reliably, described one of the winning works as a "rotten shed".
That said, though, there's a noticeable lack of venom in today's press, as if news editors - bless them - can't quite be bothered to work up the requisite degree of indignation this late in the game. Though the Daily Mail can't resist sniping that "to the casual observer, [Starling's Shedboatshed] may look like a shack," its article falls well short of splenetic. The word "masterpiece" - no irony, apparently - even sneaks past the subeditors.
And although it's good to see that the Sun has retained the services of chief art critic Toulouse le Plot, even he fails to deliver a killer blow, respectfully quoting the Tate's slightly worthy press release back at them. Does Rupert Murdoch know that "capitalist exchange" has been described as "illusory" in one of his own papers? Surely shome mishtake.
Comment pieces are likewise low in temperature. For Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian, the whole thing has a mere "dull inevitability about it", the winning work "the least satisfying installation in the show". Rachel Campbell-Johnston at the Times was a little more upbeat, under a headline that declared Simon Starling "the heir to Blake, via Wacky Races".
"Starling's work has a visionary quality," she suggests. "He stands as an inheritor of the cranky but quintessentially British tradition of William Blake or Samuel Palmer - or maybe even James Bond". Whether 007 would be prepared to trade in the converted Aston Martin for a mobile shed, however watertight, isn't mentioned.
In some ways, though, the most interesting piece in today's papers appears in the Independent - a throwback to the earliest days of this most controversial of prizes. Painter Malcom Morley, who denounced the very first award as a "horse race" and compared it to being given women's breasts ("you want them but you don't think you'll get them", bizarrely), nevertheless went on to win. As the paper notes, Morely didn't bother to turn up to the ceremony - but did somehow make time to cash the cheque.
