Pseuds’ corner

Who has not stared blankly at a bewildering installation and wondered what the blazes it was all about? Given that ideas are so fundamental to this sort of art, what we clueless punters need is clarification, not obfuscation. Which makes it all the more annoying when critics write in what seems to be a willfully abstruse way. The topic obviously struck a chord. There were some hilariously impenetrable entries and commendations go to Bill Greenwell and David Blaber. John O’Byrne invited failure and, in an act of subversion (and because it’s good), I have included him among the winners below, who get £25 each. Simon Machin pockets this week’s bonus fiver. 

We Modern Art prophets were right! Darren Donoghue, the tousle-haired Mancunian enfant terrible, has rescued the Prize from the fusty preserve of pickled Mammalia and potted gender-bending. ‘What Tracey Done’, a child’s art-kit reworking (by an imaginary four-year-old stepdaughter) of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’, extracts gritty Northern pith from subtopian Home Counties pieties. It is dazzlingly liminal, transgressing conceptual–figurative–Stuckist boundaries; boiled-sweet daubs inducing a Heimlich manoeuvre of the soul (and body); landscape-by-numbers initiating an aesthetic ground zero; a Fukayaman (or Gallagheresque) finger pointed at the question ‘Whither Art Criticism?’ An echt-Proletarian traceable back to the Engelian patriarchs, Donoghue has found a post-Marxist way to épater les bourgeois and écraser les riches. Stiff competition from a neon-lit zen bus-shelter, llama-dung Mother Teresa and Tantric nipple-piercing video notwithstanding, his painting carries, for corporate collectors, an eye-watering price tag and will send him crying all the way to a Manhattan penthouse.

Simon Machin

In that archetypal Bildungsroman Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis’s eponymous hero finally reaches his journey’s transfiguring goal only to learn that he has returned to the place from which he set out. An identical paradox has reduced Katzenjammer’s critics to floundering bafflement. ‘Mother in a Rocking Chair’, formally reminiscent as it is of Whistler’s ‘Arrangement’, is at first sight the antithesis of Katzenjammer’s previous work.