Masque of Art

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.’

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James Tidmarsh

The African cardinal who terrifies Macron

In a smallish but strong entry Brian Murdoch and Basil Ransome-Davies were just pipped by the prizewinners below who take £25 each. The bonus fiver is Noel Petty’s.

All hail Autumnus! ’Tis the time of year
To harvest blessings, for the Turner’s here,
Purveying for us nothing like so quaint
As canvases transformed by brush and paint,
A thing for which old Turner gained much fame.
But who, one asks, is Turner? Just a name.
Instead, we have a video of a fire
Relieved by artful puns on ‘choir’ and ‘quire’;
A film about a dodgy Seventies sage
Whose views on mental health were once the
rage;
A phantom city rendered in compression,
Fruit of a ten-year doodling obsession;
And four catsuited manikins, engaging
In who-knows-what midst pantomimic staging.
And that’s the Turner, a depressing musée
Wherein no kind of refuse is refusée
Noel Petty

 
As taste depreciates and Mammon rules
The fools of art revere the art of fools.
They laud the unclad emperor of fashion,
Exclaiming ‘fabulous!’ with witless passion
Or parroting ‘it asks us “what is art?”’
While studying the artist’s bottled fart
With rapt and solemn deference, thus showing
They always scent which way the wind is
blowing.