Pseuds’ corner

Who has not stared blankly at a bewildering installation and wondered what the blazes it was all about? Given that ideas are so fundamental to this sort of art, what we clueless punters need is clarification, not obfuscation. Which makes it all the more annoying when critics write in what seems to be a willfully abstruse way. The topic obviously struck a chord. There were some hilariously impenetrable entries and commendations go to Bill Greenwell and David Blaber. John O’Byrne invited failure and, in an act of subversion (and because it’s good), I have included him among the winners below, who get £25 each. Simon Machin pockets this week’s bonus fiver. 

We Modern Art prophets were right! Darren Donoghue, the tousle-haired Mancunian enfant terrible, has rescued the Prize from the fusty preserve of pickled Mammalia and potted gender-bending. ‘What Tracey Done’, a child’s art-kit reworking (by an imaginary four-year-old stepdaughter) of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’, extracts gritty Northern pith from subtopian Home Counties pieties.