[John Whitworth]

George Simmers' fine entry deservedly won money. I knew it would. Bazza just missed out. I did not even enter, more shame on me.

All hail Autumnus! ’Tis the time of year
To harvest blessings, for the Turner’s here,
Purveying for us nothing like so quaint
As canvases transformed by brush and paint,
A thing for which old Turner gained much fame.
But who, one asks, is Turner? Just a name.
Instead, we have a video of a fire
Relieved by artful puns on ‘choir’ and ‘quire’;
A film about a dodgy Seventies sage
Whose views on mental health were once the rage;
A phantom city rendered in compression,
Fruit of a ten-year doodling obsession;
And four catsuited manikins, engaging
In who-knows-what midst pantomimic staging.
And that’s the Turner, a depressing musée
Wherein no kind of refuse is refusée
Noel Petty


As taste depreciates and Mammon rules
The fools of art revere the art of fools.
They laud the unclad emperor of fashion,
Exclaiming ‘fabulous!’ with witless passion
Or parroting ‘it asks us “what is art?”’
While studying the artist’s bottled fart
With rapt and solemn deference, thus showing
They always scent which way the wind is blowing.
The painter of tradition gets small thanks
When wealth and fame accrue to mountebanks
And bragging freaks, a meritless élite,
Their only masterpiece the balance sheet.
The art world strains to camouflage the trite:
Reviewers, dealers, galleries unite
To puff the latest fad, the cresting wave,
While Turner turns, embarrassed, in his grave.
G.M. Davis

Where TURNER left us art ablaze with light,
His claimant heirs burn tapers in the night;
The judges, long accustom’d to the dark,
Take any fancied glimmer for a spark.
The four new rivals for the crowning bays
Come garlanded ahead with fawning praise.
All duly feign reluctance to compete,
As each in turn displays a vain conceit.
Here Noble draws on dreams, his world absurd
With pencil’d ruins and his faithful turd.
There Chetwynd, putting on her artless masque,
Makes seeking wit or sense an idle task.
While Price and Fowler in their flick’ring shows
Chop others’ work to trade on others’ woes.
Once more the Muse of what is fine in art
Sighs deep to see that here she has no part.
W.J. Webster

For those who worship at the feet of Art,
These recent times have meant a heavy heart.
For first a jester, with apparent pride,
Immers’d dead fauna in formaldehyde;
A woman next shew’d her dishevell’d Bed,
Containing items here best left unsaid;
A third has since scarred Tyneside with a relic
Of shapeless metal slabs, far from Angelic,
And blighted Crosby beach in Perpetuity
With egotistic structures of vacuity.
A glance at what the Turner’s now selected
Provokes one thought: how bad were those rejected?
Scatology is here, of Art devoid;
Madness and Death on o’erlong celluloid.
What better comment on these ill-judg’d forays,
Than Cicero’s ‘O tempora! O mores!’
Roger Theobald

In serious conclave now the lords of Taste
Compare the tenuous charms of works ungraced
By any touch of wit or sign of craft,
The null, the dull, the preening and the daft;
This lady plays charades; this man draws turds
Those two film videos too crass for words.
The judges huddle to evaluate — But soft!
A moaning echoes through the Tate!
Great Turner’s shade howls out: ‘What tasteless joke
Has linked my name to such dim tawdry folk?
Oh who ordained this handing of my bays
To artist-fools by critic-popinjays?’
Sweet ghost, these are not worthy of your rage;
Think them the flotsam of a half-mad age
When gulls pay millions for the worst of Hirst.
Fret not. This is a bubble. It will burst.
George Simmers

But when to mischief pranksters turn their will
How soon they find that fools admire their skill
And gifted with the talent to annoy
They court the Sage and piss on hoi polloi.
So experts spring from rubbish raised to fame
And praising turd and toilet make their name.
They spit on Aphrodite and prefer
The tragic sermon in a broken chair.
Art for today puts plastic cups on show
To take the Michel out of Angelo.
By all means let us scoff to entertain
And look for beauty in a stinking drain,
Sicken spectators with a swarm of flies
And call it thoughtful genius in disguise,
Set piles of bricks and unmade beds apart
To shock our sense — but do not call it Art.
Frank McDonald

[George Simmers]

Thanks, John. I'm feeling very pleased with myself. But I hope that the print edition sets out lines 7 and 8 properly.

[John Whitworth]

Whoops! Let me speed to see what I can do. Tsk! Tsk! Ah! Job done. Congratulations yet again, George. You must be top of the averages for the last month or so.

[George Simmers]

Not your fault, John - it's like that on the Speccie website, too. Thanks for adjusting, though.

[Jayne Osborn]

This was a toughie and I chickened out too, like John.

RESPECT, George! All the entries are excellent but big congrats to you for being the sole spherean.

Jayne

[George Simmers]

Thanks, Jayne.
Actually, I felt a bit guilty about this one, since it goes a bit against my principles to write a slating review of an exhibition I'd not seen (even though that was the premise of the comp).
So, being in London for a few days, and wanting to see the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain, I was glad to discover that if I got a two-show ticket, seeing the Turner would hardly cost anything.
So were my insults justified? Paul Noble, the one who draws and sculpts turds, has draughtsman's skills, but seems to have nothing to say.
The two video works are pretty bad. Both take existing film footage, and chop it up for sensational, disorienting effect. Elizabeth Price's is like a pretentious pop video, with banal phrases occasionally superimposed on the pictures. Luke Fowler's takes a potentially interesting subject - the ideas of R.D.Laing - and desn't do it justice.
The really silly one, though, is the performance work of Spartacus Chetwynd. Two people, dressed like bits of forest, bob around with a puppet that is supposed to be a mandrake root. Selected members of the audience are pulled up to speak to the puppet, and it whispers secrets to them. I wasn't selected, maybe because I was giggling. It's really bad.
Ms Chetwynd seems to embrace an amateur aesthetic which excuses her from being any good at puppetry. Her bio contains one of those sentences that make a parodist despair of ever catching up with the absurdity of reality: 'She lives and works in a nudist colony in South London.'
So I don't feel guilty now. And if I'd seen the show before I wrote the piece, I'd have been considerably more scathing.

[John Whitworth]

However there is an upside. The name Spartacus Chetwynd is itself an art work.

My name is Spartacus Chetwynd.
People who meet me generally get wind...

Could I enter that couplet as the first artwork in the Salon Des Refuses?

[Brian Allgar]

And my cat, who like me is called "Spartacus",
Is renowned as a terrible farter-puss.

[John Whitworth]

It's the way that you tell' em, Brian.