In a surprise move, the Turner Prize was awarded yesterday to a bewildered group of twenty academics for an unsuccessful Horizon 2020 application.
To shouts of astonishment, the judges announced that the collective, known by their project acronym ‘ENdlessDIsapPOINTment’, had secured the prize for ‘a ground-up approach to recycling an idea multiple times.’
‘The Turner Prize is all about challenging concepts of beauty,’ suggested one of the judges afterwards. ‘Whereas in the past a pickled shark and an unmade bed have made the cut, we felt that ‘ENdlessDIsapPOINTment’ challenged us to consider the essential beauty of futility.’
‘They had clearly been living with their idea for many years, and have regenerated it multiple times. The Prize is a recognition of their tenacity, their belief and the sheer ‘impossibility of (application) death in the mind of the living (applicant)’, to misquote Damien Hirst.’
‘And the artwork itself!’ went on the judge, who wished to remain anonymous for legal reasons. ‘It’s so monumental! It reminds me of the work of Rachel Whiteread or Antony Gormley. It has a haunted loneliness, a sadness, an absence. It speaks of lost hours, never to be reclaimed. At the same time it has a Utopian dynamic, reminiscent of the Russian Futurists. The claims they make for what will be achieved are, of course, ludicrous, but that just adds to the wonderful imaginative discourse.’
‘I’ve not seen anything this exciting since that bloke won it for the Buster Keaton film.’
When asked to comment, ENdlessDIsapPOINTment stated that they were ‘grateful, and £40k will come in handy, but it’s not exactly the millions of Euros we were hoping for, is it? Our plan is to put it in for the Booker next year. It’s essentially fiction so it should be eligible.’
“Turner Prize 2010 @ Tate Britain: Dexter Dalwood” by happyfamousartists is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0