Me!
You think I jest? Far from it. I have figured it out, I’ve got it sussed, I’ve cracked the code. Yesterday I wrote an article excoriating the Turner Prize judges for their choice in finalists for this prestigious £20,000 ($30,000) award for the ‘cutting edge’ of British art, sneering that one of the entries was just some lights going on and off in an empty room. Well guess who won. That’s right: Martin Creed won with ‘Light going on and off in a room’. I kid you not. Not only is this art, we are to believe it is the very pinnacle of British art!
And so, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I take it all back. What I mistook for incoherence is in fact genius! Not the judges, who are everything I said they were yesterday, but rather Martin Creed, who has also ‘cracked the code’. When asked to explain his creation he replied:
I can’t explain it, except to say that the lights definitely go on and off.
No, I am not making this up. Then when asked what he thought of the fact this prize purports to be the very best of contemporary British art, Creed replied:
It’s a stupid prize.
And what will become of the £20,000?
It is going straight in the bank.
Quite so, Martin. You will note that Creed makes no pretentious claims that his work is imbued with any meaning at all, other than a means by which he convinces the Brahmins of British art to enrich him to the tune of 20,000 pictures of Her Majesty the Queen.
Next year, however, that money is coming my way. I will enter my work called ‘Pervasive Space’. When the judges ask to view it, I shall gesture to the Tate Britain gallery. When they look and say that they see nothing, I shall reply:
Exactly! I knew that people such as yourselves, breathing only the rarified air of the art literati, would understand. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you with ‘Pervasive Space’ by Perry de Havilland. A dynamic space of variable proportion and indeterminate location, unconstrained by bourgeois limits of form, colour, space and time.
Cash, cheque or credit card are all just fine by me, thanks.
