Even the losers won’t have a word to say against the winner: this week Jeremy Deller, unprecedentedly the favourite of the bookies, the critics, the public, and his own fellow artists, won the £25 000 Turner prize.
The judges praised his “generosity of spirit, across a succession of projects that engage with social and cultural context and celebrate the creativity of individuals”.
The 38-year-old Londoner, who describes himself as “not a technically capable person”, is almost unnaturally well-liked both by the art world and the general public.
After the shockers of previous years — unmade beds, elephant dung and copulating sex dolls — Deller’s most startling revelation was that Laura Bush likes a deep-fried jalapeno chilli with her burger.
Despite his popularity with other artists, Deller has remained determinedly outside the London loop of modish contemporary art, which is generally assumed to have a stranglehold on the prize.
Much of his work has consisted of ephemeral public events, such as his spectacular recreation of the Battle of Orgreave, one of the bloodiest clashes of police and miners in the 1980s strike.
His first solo art exhibition was only 10 years ago, at his parents’ house — they were on holiday and only found out about it months later.
The annual Turner prize is the most prestigious and most rancorous in the art world, usually noted as much for controversy and faction-fighting as for the quality of the art.
In recent years it has been lambasted for obscenity, plagiarism, and — by the annual Stuckists picket — as representing only the wilder shores of conceptual art.
None of these accusations could be levelled at Deller’s competition entry, which brought together brass bands, acid house music, a memorial to a north London cyclist killed by a reckless driver, and United States President George W Bush’s favourite burger bar waitress. The only naked creatures were the 3m bats streaming from the mouth of a cave and spectacularly blackening the sunset sky as the climax of his video Memory Bucket.
Although almost all his work is broadly political, it is usually done so gently and with such wit that his victims are still smiling fondly when they feel the knife between the ribs.
One critic did call him “disgustingly twee”, and with all four shortlisted artists showing film or videos, Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard damned the whole event as “a show entirely for video nerds”. But the musician David Byrne’s description of Deller’s work as “hilarious and touching” is a more common reaction.
Memory Bucket, his pilgrimage across Bush country, was created 18 months ago — before it was certain that Bush would run for office again — but became eerily topical when the exhibition opened in the last throes of the election campaign.
The work of the four artists was notably more grown-up and political than in previous years. “We’ve gone for substance over shock,” David Thorp, one of the judges, said.
The show acquired an even sharper edge when the central piece of the exhibition by Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, a film they made in a Kabul courtroom, had to be withdrawn at the last moment after legal advice that it could be prejudicial to the trial of a suspected Afghan warlord.
The judges said they “wished to record their respect for the outstanding presentations by all four artists”. However, some found the show too grown-up: one critic called it the second-most boring Turner prize ever. Nonetheless visitor numbers, at 1 211 a day, 50 000 so far, have been only fractionally down on last year’s. — Â