Seven Days in the Art World (14 page)

Slouching with his hands in the pockets of his black jeans, Titchner explained the spinning sculpture, which is called
Ergo Ergot:
“Ergo refers to René Descartes’s famous statement, ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ Ergot is a fungus with hallucinogenic properties that was synthesized to make LSD.” Titchner has no problem with words, but, self-conscious about being perceived as pretentious, he hedged his way to a conclusion: “I guess it is kind of like the case that reality is not what it seems to be. We build our belief systems with fragments of faith.” He swept his hair out of his eyes, then asked, as if thinking aloud, “What does it mean for a work of art to succeed in this context? People like it? It’s bought for a lot of money? Critics like it?” He stopped short of mentioning the judges.

After the crowd dispersed, Titchner lingered in his exhibition. He told me that coming back to the exhibition was a little bit like returning to the scene of the crime. It was difficult because “you start questioning some of the decisions you’ve made.” Like the other nominees, he found that the prize process made him uneasy. “It’s cool to have qualified,” he said. “But I think you could get obsessed and spend all day Googling yourself.” Titchner couldn’t bear to read the press. “Right now, I’m not interested,” he said, wrinkling his nose as if he’d just caught wind of a revolting smell. “I’ve read stuff in the past and got angry when I felt that the work had been done a disservice. It’s nothing to do with me, really.” He looked at his feet and then slowly swept the oak floor with his gaze. “For an artist, the most important thing is to entertain yourself on a daily basis. And you want to be able to sustain a level for a long period and actually get better.”

I told Titchner that I was under the impression that most artists, whatever their odds, think they’re going to win. First, friends, dealers, and other believers surround the artists with support; any nay-saying tends to be done behind their back. Second, the minute the artists agree to participate in the prize, they enter a strange zone where they need huge amounts of self-belief in order to weather the public scrutiny. “Thinking you’re going to win is a good way of torturing yourself,” Titchner admitted with a pained expression. “My contemporaries have been very supportive, but a few have said, ‘Oh yeah, well done. The show looks great, but you won’t win.’”

After reading a feature on Rebecca Warren in the British fashion magazine
Harpers & Queen
, in which the sculptor likened herself to a “pervy middle-aged provincial art teacher,” I pestered the Tate press office yet again for an interview. With five days left until the final judgment, I was offered a last minute, non-negotiable, one-hour slot. When we sat down in a meeting room at Tate Britain, Warren wore jeans, a black blazer, and green leather boots that had the air of being just one pair in a considerable collection of trophy footwear. Her dark hair was pulled back in a disheveled ponytail. “I’ve tried not to think about the prize in a competitive way, because it would involve second-guessing the best way to work, and it might affect the art,” she told me. “I wanted to be as true as I could to the lineage of what I’ve been doing. Eventually things crystallize. Your work takes on a form that’s recognizable, or otherwise you’ll never be known. It has to become apparent that ‘Oh, Rebecca Warren makes that kind of thing.’”

Although Warren is clearly determined about her career, she was curiously ambivalent about her work. “I don’t necessarily love the things that I’m making,” she said. “It’s about allowing yourself to accept what you do.” When I asked the tough question What makes a great work of art? she ventured a tentative answer. “A great work,” she said, “allows you to look at it without it nagging you. It’s not that it’s open to
any
interpretation, but it’s not got a limited fixed meaning.” Warren was nevertheless amused by the tabloids’ reductive antics. Back when the shortlist was announced, the
Daily Star
ran a story headlined “Booby Prize for Art.” It depicted one of her figures with gargantuan buttocks next to a speech bubble that said, “Does my bum look big in this?” Warren’s reaction was unequivocal: “Once you’ve got in the
Daily Star
, you just think, this is brilliant.”

Warren’s work bears witness to the legacy of Young British Artists, or YBAs, an acronym coined by Charles Saatchi. The YBAs were part aesthetic tendency, part brand identity, part social group. Their diverse, generally figurative artistic output shared an ability to trigger media “scandals.” Damien Hirst was for many years considered the ringleader of this at once amorphous and cliquey part of the London art world. It was initially affiliated with the art school at Goldsmiths but has since tended to move in the hinterland of the White Cube gallery. When I asked Warren about her attitude to the term, she admitted, “I’m PYBA—post–Young British Artist. I’m the same age, but I’ve come along later. I’m attached, but not quite attached. I know most of those people, but I also know the younger generation.”

Rumors have
circulated over the years that Nick Serota manipulates the final verdicts of the Turner Prize judges. When I mentioned this, he initially replied obliquely: “I work in a society that doesn’t value art as much as I think it should, and therefore I’ve always thought that taking a hard line about one kind of art would be destructive.” Then he added with a little irritation, “My tastes are broader than my reputation.” Serota closed his eyes to think for a rather long time before he admitted, “In the lull before the event—I won’t say storm—I begin to consider how I can orchestrate a good result, how I might put a bit of emphasis here or there to get a good conversation going to ensure that everyone who wants to say something has a chance to do so. Sometimes, when there is a deadlock, I have had to lean, because in those circumstances I don’t think we should settle on everyone’s third choice.”

This year, the judges, whose combined personal preferences will create an objective winner, include a journalist and three curators. Lynn Barber, a columnist with the
Observer,
is the only art world outsider. In October, two days before the exhibition opened, she published an account of her experiences as a judge in an article titled “How I Suffered for Art’s Sake.” “I hate to say it,” she wrote, “but my year as a Turner juror has seriously dampened, though I hope not extinguished, my enthusiasm for contemporary art.” Barber complained that her qualifications to be a judge were negligible, the prize’s rules were “weird,” and her judgment went “haywire.” At the same time, she asserted that while all four artists were producing “interesting work,” one of them was so “outstanding” that she “would have thought the winner was blindingly obvious.” In fact, the problem started earlier, during the process of shortlisting; Barber complained that her artist picks were so “brutally rejected” that she wondered whether she had been chosen merely as a “fig leaf” to cover the machinations of the art world.

The Tate’s officials were privately furious. “Lynn’s article will make it more difficult for the jury to work together,” admitted Serota. “In the past, people have been able to speak their mind feeling pretty confident that what they say will not be written down and used in evidence against them.” One of Barber’s accusations was that the jury didn’t seriously consider nominations from the public. Serota disagreed. “The jury do take those nominations seriously.” He raised his eyebrows and chortled silently. “But
not
to the point of doing
deep
investigations into an artist who has shown
once
in Scunthorpe!”

The other judges were dismayed as well. One of them, Andrew Renton, who runs the curating program at Goldsmiths and also manages a private contemporary art collection, told me, “I fear that she has shot her load. She has sidelined herself as a judge by going public before we’ve finished the process.” Renton also said that Barber’s inexperience had led her to put forth nominations that the others felt were “beyond premature.” The Turner Prize, like any award that aims to stand for something coherent, needs to be conferred at the right time. As Renton explained, “To give the Turner nomination to someone who is straight out of art school is utterly irresponsible. By the same token, it shouldn’t become a midlife-crisis prize.” The Turner Prize honors artists on the cusp between what the art world would call “late emergent” and “early midcareer.” Lifetime achievement awards present little drama, as they can’t go seriously wrong, whereas prizes that recognize promise in very young artists offer less excitement because the stakes are so small.

Renton hadn’t made up his mind who should win. “The greatest critical work in my mind is the Talmud,” he said. “It’s one argument superseding another—an ongoing, open-ended dialogue that allows multiple points of view. For me, that is what art is about.” Conflicts of perspective may enlighten, but conflicts of interest can confuse. In overseeing a private art collection, Renton buys art on a weekly basis. “We were probably the first real supporters of Rebecca’s sculpture. We also own several videos by Phil Collins, and we’ve just bought a Titchner piece. The only artist we don’t own is Tomma Abts.” Renton continued, “The more qualified a person is to be a judge, the more conflict there is going to be…Still, I have to be more kosher than kosher. In the jury room, my agenda is transparent. I’m disempowered.”

Margot Heller, another judge, is the director of the South London Gallery, a public space with a strong track record for showing young artists who go on to receive Turner Prize nominations. Like many who devote themselves to the discreet, elite world of art, Heller is mediaphobic, but she tried hard to open up, as if using the occasion of my visit as a free trial of aversion therapy. “I have heard many people asserting, with absolute conviction, that so-and-so will win,” she managed. “But I’m a judge and I honestly don’t know who the winner will be.” When I met her in her white office, Heller was dressed in a white shirt buttoned up to the collar. “I don’t think there is such a thing as the four most outstanding artists,” she said with an anxious glance at my digital recorder. “It is a group decision. I am genuinely happy with the four we chose, but it’s not the same as if you asked me alone to come up with a shortlist.”

The fourth judge is Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns, the oldest artist-led exhibition space in New York. I met Higgs in his closetlike office surrounded by piles of bubble-wrapped artworks by disabled artists. Higgs trained as an artist and still makes his own art, such as found and framed book pages that bear titles like
Not Worth Reading
and
Art Isn’t Easy.
I’d heard that he had the ability to sway a jury and could be “ruthless in his dismissal and superbly articulate in his advocacy.” When I mentioned this, Higgs peered at me through his Buddy Holly glasses and said, “I wouldn’t damn anything. I support things that I believe in, and I believe in a lot of things.” Although he said he admired the prize’s role in democratizing art, he thought it was a shame that “quiet, sensitive work often gets drowned out, while flashy, photogenic work becomes mythic noise around the show.” Was this a hint? Higgs gave a further indication of whom he might support in the jury room when he explained what makes a great work of art: “It’s not about innovation for innovation’s sake or the ambition to be novel or unique. All good art gives us an opportunity for a different relationship with time.” To this, Higgs added in a barely audible mumble, “It’s usually about an individual’s radically idiosyncratic interpretation of the world. We’re inherently fascinated by work like that because we’re inherently fascinated by other people.”

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.”