For some years now, the excellent English monthly review of books
Literary Review has sponsored a Bad Sex Contest. Readers submit
preposterous descriptions of sex from the current crop of novels,
and the editors at the Literary Review have the delicate task
of choosing the most awful candidate. Needless to say, there is
always an embarrassment of riches. The winning submission is
regularly accompanied by any number
of honorable mentions. The
same spirit informs the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the
scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Winners of that
contest have included Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, and Judith
Butler—a triumvirate of absurd figures whose unintentionally
laughable writing richly deserves the obloquy conferred upon it
by the Bad Writing Contest.

With these noble precedents in mind, we would like to suggest
that the Tate Gallery
in England consider renaming the
once-prestigious Turner Prize. In recent years, the £20,000 prize
has been given to a rogues gallery of artistic charlatans:
Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers, among
others. This year, the chief contender is a woman called Tracey
Emin. Her short-listed submission is called “My Bed.” Here is a
description of it from the London Daily Telegraph:

Emin shows one new work,
supposedly her own unmade bed, complete with
torn pillows and urine-stained sheets, surrounded
by ashtrays full of smoked fags, a box of sanitary
towels, medicines, nylons, soiled underpants, a
candle, a pregnancy test—the sad detritus of a
life marked by physical illness and emotional
disorder. On the gallery wall there’s a neon sign
in Emin’s own script that says “Every Part of
Me’s Bleeding,” an appliquéd wall hanging (“F—
School”), and a wall of her scribbly drawings, in
most of which the word “F—” is scrawled like an
incantation, a guarantee of authenticity.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of the greatest painters
England ever produced. Isn’t it time to remove his name from a
prize that travesties everything Turner stood for? The Tate
Gallery does not employ the wicked satire that the Literary
Review and Philosophy and Literature wield
in their admirable
contests. But a simple desire for truth in advertising demands
that the Turner Prize be renamed. The simplest and most truthful
alternative is readily at hand: the Bad Art Contest. We offer it
to the Tate Gallery free and without charge.