In Competition 2770 you were invited to submit a response, in the style of Alexander Pope, to the recently announced Turner Prize short list or to the contemporary art scene in general.
Inspiration for this assignment came from the art critic Robert Hughes’s ‘The Sohoiad or the Masque of Art: a satire in heroic couplets drawn from life’, which was published in the mid-Eighties in the New York Review of Books. In it Hughes, under the byline Junius Secundus, lampoons the Manhattan art scene — ‘The pompous novelty, the well-hyp’d trick/ Delivered in the merest Augenblick’ — and those in its thrall: ‘The temper of the age decrees at once/ That none may tell the Dancer from the Dunce.’
In a smallish but strong entry Brian Murdoch and Basil Ransome-Davies were just pipped by the prizewinners below who take £25 each.
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