George Shaw - Turner Prize

It would be a fantastic moment for art if George Shaw were to win this years Turner Prize. For most, the event has become a joke about Londons vanity, stupidity and the triumph of poor writing over visual art.. Each year sees it become less relevent to the majority of peoples visual dissemination of their surroundings. Shaws exhibition at the Baltic took the art of the sincere and observant to Newcastle, Englands polar opposite to London. His work has taken an area he understands deeply, an area that we all know, bar, perhaps farmers and Londoners yet I feel shaw they too know, even if they have merely passed through on journeys elsewhere, forgotten grounds, and revealed a truth many art cogiscenti have sought to rise above. There is life, in abscence; as James Joyce said 'abscence is the greatest form of prescence', and thown your offcuts back with a sincerity I have struggled to see n ar for years. My only queery is why they let his work through? Its' superiority in chronicling England today makes a mockery of the era of shock and pretension it supercedes. If an artists objective is to reveal a truth others miss, or to leave a marker in time for future generations to grasp how life was in their time, Shaw easily trumps most of his contemporaries. If the judges are brave, he will win; if they wish to attach their judgement to our recent artistic past then he will be overlooked.