Turner Prize Betting 2008

The Turner Prize is an annual award for visual art in a competition for British artists aged under 50. It is the most renowned prize in art because it usually attracts the most controversy. It has been particularly associated with ‘conceptual art’ in recent years and the likes of Tracy Emin with her unmade bed and Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde have featured heavily in the largely adversely critical British press appraisal of the event. Traditional artists are eligible for entry, however, and painters have been known to win the prize.

Turner Prize betting is a win only affair. Many online betting sites offer odds on the contenders but these can vary considerably and it’s wise to check out the best on offer at the time. There are free bets available to new customers and it’s worth checking round for the best offers. There are sites that will help you to do this as well as find the bookie that best serves your needs. Online betting sites are easily navigable these days and there are many that have proved their reliability over the years. As well as betting on the Turner Prize and other arts prizes, they also offer facilities for just about any sport, political and TV event you can think of.

Turner Prize Betting Short List

There are four nominees, each year, for the Turner Prize and the public are invited to nominate any artist who has mounted a show in the previous year. Many people suspect that the public’s suggestions have little influence on the final list but this remains unproven. In July, the list of the favoured four is announced and in October, Tate Britain begins to show their work and the winner of the prize is announced in early December. This year we have Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga, Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes in the running and the exhibitions curator, Sophie O’Brien feels that this is a ‘really exciting year’ for the prize. Wilkes work consists of a supermarket checkout with a Mannequin sat on a toilet and a bowl of dried up bits of porridge by her feet. Leckey has images of Felix the Cat in his Industrial Light and Magic show while Islam’s work consists of a woman in white wandering around with bits of broken porcelain on the floor. Macuga has a glass, steel and fabric installation entitled ‘Haus der Frau 2.

Press interest is huge, largely because the papers enjoy revelling in their claims that the exhibits are usually absurd and about as far from art as you can get. The artists seem to have gained inspiration from Marcel Duchamp who, in 1917, exhibited a urinal named ‘The Fountain’ as a protest against the stultifying limitation imposed on the work of artists at the time. Sometimes, one might be excused for thinking that modern conceptual artists have confused this act of protest with an actual art object and gone on to formalise it as art. Whether or not this is the case, the failure of anyone on the planet to define the term ‘art’ has led us to this impasse over the artistic validity of many of the Turner exhibits.

The bottom line is that the Turner Prize betting fan is hard pressed to figure out the likely winner because no one has a clue what goes on in the minds of the judges. In the words of art critic, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘this year the Turner Prize is going to be very, very confusing’. Not unlike the last ten, if you ask me.