Last week Mark Leckey — the only male artist on the shortlist — won Britain’s Turner Prize. We didn’t know who he was — but that’s part of the point of the Turner Prize, to give airtime to artists we don’t already know — so we decided to find out what we could. In order of impressions: he speaks a bit like Russell Brand, he seems to think very very slowly, and this is either an elaborate and ground-breaking piece of performance art (possible) or a sign that his work is actually all over the place (likely).
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We just finished reading Sarah Thornton’s brilliantly readable and wonderful and didactic-without-lecturing book Seven Days in the Art World. And the thing that struck us, in between parsing the minutiae of Artforum vs artforum.com’s editorial relationship and trying to figure out how to reasonably make friends with L.A. gallerists Blum & Poe, was how much of a period piece it was.
Thornton’s book, which came out earlier this month, is, like most books, the product of years and years of research and (in her case, participant) observation and work and is so rooted in a time before now. What struck us the most about Seven Days, though, was how we were unable to read it without the feeling that this was a historical snapshot rather than a contemporary glimpse. Reading about collectors waiting like nervous racehorses before the opening of the Art Basel gates and seeing the way in which galleries controlled which buyers got access to which artists, how being on the list to buy a piece of art was as much an important accomplishment as the purely fiscal ability to acquire, all seemed like a dramatized version of a past we vaguely remember.
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