When the four artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize fell into conversation, they quickly decided that they didn’t want to compete against each other. They asked to be judged as a single collective and this week the Prize was shared between them.
Now, I haven’t won a competition since sixth form drama, but I do know I wouldn’t watch a football match where the teams decided beforehand to fix the result. There must be a way to recognise excellence and that includes competition. But looking at the artists’ installations on the Turner website, I can understand their choice.
An imagined city exploring feminine modes of experience
The voices of women in the Northern Irish peace movement
An inner landscape drawing on the artist’s childhood in Colombia
An auditory reconstruction of a Syrian prison where inmates could see
An auditory reconstruction of a Syrian prison where inmates could see nothing and sounds took on a new significance
It’s not just the difficulty of comparing these works. The artists describe them as ‘acts of solidarity’ with people who are suffering or silenced, and sharing the prize was a further act of solidarity for them.
I respond to that as a rebellion against the culture of status and the way it distracts from what’s really important. For all my Buddhist practice, I notice the stealthy influence in my own life of what Alain de Botton calls ‘status anxiety’: comparing myself to others and trying to measure up. His career, her income, their children. The nagging sense that there’s something more important that I should be doing. The tendency to compare is pervasive and hard to resist, but it’s a sure way to make yourself miserable.
Thinking that you’re better than others is an obvious form of conceit, but Buddhist teachings say that thinking you’re worse than others is another. Both depend on a fixed idea of who we are that binds our self-worth to external measures. But the answer, Buddhism says, also isn’t to think that we’re equal. That’s another comparison and it also limits us.
I’m interested in what opens up when I let go of comparisons: how a more realistic understanding of my virtues and limitations allows space for gratitude, appreciation and even reverence: looking up to the qualities that exceed my own.
Most interesting of all, and present in those Turner artworks, is all the still, sad music of humanity that calls to our understanding and tugs at our compassion from far beyond the categories of winning and losing.
