The Turner Prize plays it safe this year
Robert Barry, Apollo
October 2022
This year’s Turner Prize show at Tate Liverpool is bright, brash, bursting with colour and every bit an exhibition of ‘Art’ with a big capital A. Everything here looks and sounds like art. Where last year’s prize sought to tease and test at the borders of what we can call art, questioning the limits of a prize of this sort and feeling at times as much like a social enterprise as a gallery, the Turner in 2022 seems desperate to define itself as a real art exhibition. Look at all this art. See how arty it all is. That doesn’t mean it’s an entirely conservative show. Nor is it apolitical. There are few fronts in the contemporary culture wars that are not in some way tackled across these four displays. And – as you might expect from the UK’s most prestigious art prize – a lot of the work is very good. Some of it is excellent. But if you’re looking to get your aesthetic assumptions upended and your notions of what art can be expanded, this may not be the Turner for you. […]