Cultural Anxieties at the Turner Prize

Looking back to past injustice or forward to impending crisis, this year's is a nervy, loud and unstable Prize |

View this email in your browser Insider Style Ahh the Turner Prize. Remember the co-winners of 2019? And after the COVID-enforced absence of its 2020 edition, the "all-collectives social-practice shoulder-shrug" of 2021? Well, this year the prize, which was established to 'promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art', has pivoted back to presenting individual artists who "make stuff you can look at in a gallery". Throwbacks and whatnot. But, as J.J. Charlesworth asks in his review of the 2022 exhibition, what might it actually say about the state of contemporary British art today? There is time for Heather Phillipson's diverse installations of flatscreen beasts and video-projection cloud formations, a "visual poem of disaster and delirium"; Sin Wai Kin's baroque takes on gender via avatars of drag queens and K-pop-like quartets; Veronica Ryan's quirky, absorbing objects that "remain themselves, but whisper of place and memory and vistas of domestic life"; and Ingrid Pollard's exploration of hinterland England, with its fogeyish and defensive attachment to its traditions, a work "complex and open rather than immediately accusatory". It all amounts to a nervy, loud and unstable show – but one troubled by a lazy bad habit of insider selection. Read now © 2022 ArtReview Ltd. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at www.artreview.com or the previous digital magazine website Our mailing address is: ArtReview Ltd. 1 Honduras Street London, England EC1Y 0TH United Kingdom Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.