The Anti-Turner Prize

In less than 24 hours, the winner of the Turner Prize 2010 will be announced. Traditionally, this is the moment for purists to wail that JMW Turner would be turning in his grave. This year’s shortlist - Susan Philipsz, Angela de la Cruz, Dexter Dalwood and the Otolith Group - is more than usually uninspiring.

It’s a dreary, empty exhibition. It makes you long for the halcyon days of Jim Lambie’s psychedelic canaries, Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed, and Rebecca Warren’s fleshly goddesses. 

This year there are deserted galleries piped with sound art, banks of video screens, sack-like and deflated canvases, and a meditation on the Death of David Kelly. Depressing stuff.

However, Turner needn’t roll in his grave just yet, for a bricklayer from Dorset is upholding the grand tradition of the Turneresque landscape.

Antony Spencer is the winner of this year’s Take a View landscape photography awards. The winning photograph scooped £10,000 and will be on display for six weeks at the National Theatre.

The photograph (top,) taken as the sun rises over Corfe Castle, is strikingly reminiscent of Turner’s great Romantic landscape Dolbadarn Castle (below.)

Dolbadarn Castle is one of Turner’s most important paintings. Sketched in situ in 1798, and later worked up and submitted to the Royal Academy in 1800, the painting secured Turner's election to the post of Academician. 

It’s the quintessential romantic landscape: ruined castle on distant promontory, figures dwarfed by the sublimity of nature, ravines, rocky outcrops, gathering banks of cloud. Turner even affixed some suitably heroic verse to the painting. The poem recounts the fate of Owain the Red,  who was imprisoned for twenty two years in Dolbadarn by his brother Llewelyn the Last:

How awful is the silence of the waste...

Majestic solitude, behold the tower

Where hapless Owen, long imprison’d, pin’d

And wrung his hands for liberty in vain.

Antony Spencer isn’t Turner. His photographs tend towards the pinky-purpley screensavery end of things. But it’s nice to see the English landscape tradition alive and well. In these soulless days of the crinkle-crankle static of sound art and the tortuous introspection of post-post-conceptual art, it is reassuring to find a photographer taking pleasure in dawn light, frosted gorse, green and pleasant fields and that old romantic chestnut: the castle on a cliff. 

In Vino Venustas: How Caravaggio became Marks and Spencer's new poster boy

Earlier in the week, I spotted this bottle of Pinot Grigio in the Marks and Spencer flagship store at Marble Arch. The painting on the label is Caravaggio’s The Musicians (1595.)

Three students of music are caught off-guard as they tune their instruments, consult their sheet music and generally limber up for a performance. Cupid makes this trio a quartet. He fusses with a bunch of grapes, giving them a prune before they're still-life ready. If music be the food of love, play on.

It's a great image for a bottle of wine. Cupid’s grapes are a small, but vital, detail. The painting says: company, love, music, and art, these are the important things in life, but a glass of wine is a fine addition.  

If you were being pedantic you might say that a Garganega wine from the Veneto would have been better illustrated by a Venetian artist. A nice Bacchus by Titian, maybe? But I like the contrast between a refined and rarefied northern wine and a hot-blooded southern painter. At Tesco and Sainsbury’s you can get a Garganega wine with a Canaletto on the label: a clean, bright white wine married with an immaculate and exacting Venetian artist.

Alas, the civilising M&S mission has stopped at one bottle of white wine. There is as yet no Rembrandt roast beef, no Salvador Dali Lobster Thermidor, and no Damien Hirst shark fin soup.