A Year Of Bad Art

You would think that it would be a great honor to be selected as a judge in Britain’s notorious Turner Prize competition. But for Lynn Barber, who has spent the last year viewing submissions for the Turner, the experience has been terribly depressing. “There is so much bad work around, so much that is derivative, half-baked or banal, you can’t believe that galleries would show it. I think what happened is that the huge success of the YBAs in the Nineties has created a peculiar post-boom glut whereby there are now more galleries looking for young artists than worthwhile artists to fill them.”