Turner Prize 2021: the ‘worthiest’ and ‘also, perhaps, the worst’ edition yet?

Herbert Art Gallery show features work by five fashionable ‘collectives’ committed to various social causes

An assistant poses on an artwork by Cooking Sections
An assistant poses on an artwork by Cooking Sections, one of the shortlisted artists for the annual Turner Prize 2021
(Image credit: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

The decline of the Turner Prize “has been one of the unhappiest sights of my spell as an art critic”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Back in its 1990s “heyday”, Britain’s most prestigious modern art award was “annually annoying”, but it “provided us with a summary of what was actually happening in British art”; and it gave us a winner we could argue about.

In recent years it has been reduced to drivel. “As evidence, I give you the Turner Prize 2021, an event so manipulated and phoney it makes 1980s pro wrestling look real.”

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