Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"NO JURY, NO PRIZES" was one of the great slogans of modernism, but since publicity is today valued more than autonomy, ours is a time when, as the Dodo said, "all must have prizes." The art world's best-known award, the Turner Prize, is a consequence of this shift in values, which naturally goes unmentioned, not to say unlamented, in Tate Britain's retrospective of Turner-winning art. The exhibition does, however, shed light on the past twenty-two years of contemporary art in Britain, on that art's relationship to the public, and--not least--on what kinds of artwork typically garner and then benefit from what journalist Laurence Marks, writing of the first competition in 1984, characterized as "a great cloud of...
