Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123.
Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed to me personally but I did play my part.
What happened was this. Anglia Ruskin staged a ‘Sustainable Art’ competition and the winning entry was a 6ft high mock stone slab (made out of plywood) engraved with the names of six notorious ‘climate deniers’ including me, Christopher Booker and Lord Lawson, no less.
It’s a handsome piece of art, clever too because in ingenious installation-y style a continual stream of symbolic engine oil cascades down the face of the slab, which bears the legend ‘Lest we forget those who denied.’ But I think what probably clinched it wasn’t the design or the technical skill but the impeccable correctness of its politics.
The piece’s creator, a third-year fine art student called Ian Wolter, clearly knows how to please a sustainability prize judging panel. He declared: ‘With this work I envisage a time when the deliberate denial of climate change will be seen as a crime because it hinders progress towards a low-carbon future.’
So young, so certain. I wonder what deep background research led him to form this considered view. Actually, no I don’t, because it’s obvious.
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