The art world is reeling today, after the coveted Turner Prize, given annually to the top conceptual artists from around Britain, was won by a large brown donkey which wandered into the Tate gallery by accident and defecated onto a discarded crisp packet.
The donkey which escaped a nearby sanctuary and wandered into the gallery at roughly the time of the exhibition’s opening reportedly left through an open stable door and found an empty and comfortable space in the installation of an artist known only as ‘[ . ]’. The installation, (called ‘Trough Cunt Blair Paedo Buckaroo 548865’) was designed as an empty stable to reflect the meaningless of capitalist culture but made a comfortable home for the seven year old one eyed farmyard animal who stayed there for several days eating discarded hors d'oeuvres and sleeping on symbolic bails of hay.
Gallery security have apologized for the mistake, stating that they simply thought that the introduction of a loose donkey was probably part of a Soho art student’s statement about imperialism, or social networking or ‘the West’ or horses or feminism or something.
The cautiousness of the staff has been justified by the notorious incidents where, in 2010 a janitor tidied away a pile of rubbish that was actually a piece of art by Theodore Quunt; a brilliant deconstruction of post-modern sanitation regulation and a similar incident in 2011 when a diligent janitor fixed a flickering light which turned out to be the totality of Elaine Surname’s piece ‘Yes, It’s Just a Flickering Light’, which went on to win the prize.
The pooing ass- which has been identified as ‘Sandy’ by its stable- won out over entries such as Peyton Westlake’s ‘China 17th April 1943’ which is two formaldehyde tanks which display the two halves of Damien Hirst’s cadaver and Pazio Linguatico’s ‘Memoryscapes #396’; an installation piece in which a visibly confused and distressed Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown had been lured into a perspex sphere with seven badgers and three metaphors.
Other entrants, such as Mary McGuire, whose ‘flowers’ was a quite nice watercolour painting of some flowers and Horton Del whose installation was a sealed empty room which no one was ever allowed to see, have been vocally outraged that the stray donkey has upstaged their art and undermined the very, very important award
Before being exposed as being simply a lost mule the installation drew rave reviews from papers such as the Guardian, whose arts correspondent Delilah Muv claimed it, ‘explored the liminal space between contemporary aesthetics and livestock’ and Peter Grayditch of the Times who called its persistent braying a ‘vibrant discussion of what it means to be an individual in today’s wi-fi, twitter, fax machine pseudo-‘society’’
Charles Saatchi today commented on the upset in a press conference earlier today, wherein he gave reporters an enigmatic smile, shrugged and said ‘art’ seventeen times at different volumes and with differing tones to a standing ovation.
It is currently unknown what the donkey or its owners will do with the prize money, though Sandy is already courting offers for further works, including a proposed installation by Tracey Emin wherein the controversial artist plans to ride the famous mule around a neon reconstruction of Robert Mugabe’s face while in blackface
MM
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