Top artwork of 2008 is... a lecture

Published on Tuesday 2 December 2008 01:29

BOOKMAKERS' favourite Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize last night, beating three other artists to claim one of the art world's most prestigious and contentious awards.

Leckey, 44, from London, created videos and sculptures inspired by Felix the Cat and Jeff Koons's metal rabbit sculpture. His Cinema-in-the-Round features a lecture on his love of animation, while an episode of The Simpsons plays.

The artist said: "It's about things that you desire and I desire and my trying to work out my relationship with them … and I want to know why."

Leckey received 25,000 and his profile in the contemporary art world is likely to rise as a result of the award and the publicity it generates.

Speaking about the impact the win would have, he said: "I can increase my scope. I want to make a television series. Now hopefully, maybe that can happen."

The prize is awarded to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work in the 12 months before 6 May.

Glasgow-based Cathy Wilkes prepared an installation, Give You All My Money 2008, for the prize exhibition.

It included two supermarket checkout stands scattered with unwashed bowls and cups and two naked mannequins, a common feature of her installations. One was sitting on a toilet, the other had a bird cage on its head.

"This is to do with separation between people and the impossibility of feeling what someone else feels," Wilkes said.

The Tate said the objects had been "delicately and precisely placed within the space so that we might look with fresh eyes at things we pass by every day".

Another artist reproduced design work from almost 80 years ago. Polish-born Goshka Macuga recreated the textile displays made by the German modernist designer Lilly Reich for the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, using original drawings and photographs.

By displaying the glass and steel installations without the textiles and in the context of a gallery, Macuga is "elevating the industrial make-up of the structures to the status of museum objects", the Tate said.

She has also made collages using material from the Tate archives of the artist Paul Nash and the surrealist Eileen Agar.

Runa Islam, who was born in Bangladesh and lives in London, made a film of a woman who hurls teapots and teacups to the floor in what appears to be an art gallery.

The Turner Prize is awarded for a body of work – not just that showing in the exhibition. It has traditionally been won by controversial work. Previous winners include Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst and the transvestite potter Grayson Perry.

It may be the UK's best known arts prize, but with this year's selection it looked like slipping into irrelevance. Symbolically, the Tate Gallery put the prize on show in the basement rather than the main floor.

Last year's winner, Mark Wallinger, with his painstaking reproduction of an Iraq War protest camp, briefly put the prize back in the forefront of political debate.

Other critics this year said the exhibition by the four artists risked looking like the "returns desk of Ikea", in a glaring case of "overtalked, pseudo-intellectual" junk.

The Scotsman's art critic, Duncan Macmillan, said Leckey's win was "unbelievable. He pompously gives a lecture". He added: "It's the art that should speak, not the artist."