Turner Prize Outrage

There was shock and outrage yesterday when the Turner Prize shortlist was announced and there seemed to be nothing on it that caused any shock and outrage in the UK’s tabloid press.
A spokesman for the UK’s tabloid newspapers said:

This is absolutely disgusting. In the old days the Turner Prize used to almost guarantee us headlines for several days about how absurd it all was, and how so-called modern art was rubbish and the sort of thing a 5 year-old could do.
So, we got plenty of page-fillers about it, our readers would feel that they’d had their prejudices confirmed and that modern art was really a waste of time and some huge con-trick. Meanwhile the Turner Prize itself would get loads of publicity, the artists would get plenty of media attention, especially from the broadsheets, because the posh papers love to pretend to love anything that the tabloids despise, whilst secretly being jealous of their readership figures, the art lovers could all feel smug and superior to the bourgeois conventional reactionary tabloid readers and… well, we all knew where we stood and we all got something out of it.
Now, though, it is just dull stuff, one or two of them are even painters, it seems. There is some little hope, though; one of them – I think – films herself singing under bridges, but without the traditional filthy overcoat stuffed with old newspapers, heavily matted beard and several cans of Special Brew, so we might be able to get something out of that.

However, as an independent art critic, Pointless Daubings, said:

Although, the Turner Prize does, this year, fail what seems to be its main purpose, in annoying what it likes to see as the philistines who live outside the cosy self-contained, self-absorbed and self-referential ‘art’ world, I think it is safe to say that this year’s list does continue the great Turner Prize shortlist tradition of only promoting tedious art school head-wank.
Having said that, though, there is a common position in modern art that says ‘if the artist decides it is art, then it is art.’ I would add to this the proviso that ‘if the viewer of that piece of art decides it is a load of old toss, then it is a load of old toss.’