Turner and Cage

Last night I was lucky enough to be at the Turner Prize awards do when Martin Boyce was announced as the winner. Although only yards away, few people in the room seemed to see the pink tutu’d stage invader, and I certainly didn’t. This sterling job by the security men was perhaps just the finishing touch to the grand job that BALTIC has done hosting the Turner Prize show, which has been a bit of a phenomenon, attracting 120,000 visitors so far. (Hope the Arts Council take that into account for BALTIC’s KPIs...) 

There’s been so much gloom about the North East’s economy, it’s been great to see the success of this first trip for Turner to a non-TATE venue outside London. Culture still has a role to play in making the North East a great place to live. It may not be able to stop the Monday morning trains from Teesside being full of Monday-Thursday-migrant workers off down to London, but it has a role.

I wasn’t going to write about the Turner Prize, but I made the mistake of reading the comments on the Guardian’s coverage. If that Guardian site is like that I shudder to think what the Mail readers are saying. (Actually I shudder every time I think about the Daily Mail period.) Then I was listening to a radio programme about John Cage which ended with him saying the following, and thought it was worth sharing. 

‘If we have the view that we used to have, that there was only one right way of observing the relationships of things then we have a situation that really doesn’t appeal to me. We have, in other words, one thing that’s right and all the rest are wrong. I would like to have a multiplicity of rights.’