Leckey wins Turner Prize

This year's Turner Prize has resulted in the normal praise and brickbats.  Fanning the flames, winner Mark Leckey claimed that the young British Artists (Hirst, Emin and Banksy) who led the contemporary boom were a bad thing for the country's art.

Mark Lecky; 'Felix gets broadcasted'

Some of the more interesting comment on Leckey's art came from Rachel Campbell Johnson in The Times: 'Leckey spins culture about like some mad DJ at the mixing table. We live in an era in which what could once be safely labelled as “reality” has dissolved away, he seems to say. A visual culture in which surveillance monitors are like rats in New York – you are never more than six feet from one – in which every house has a television set, every phone a camera, in which we can recognise thousands of places we have never been to, know thousands of people we have never met.'

Perhaps cameras and rats are an unfortunate coincidence but our visual culture is real enough. Rachel's column (in the hard-copy Times) is supplemented by her headshot portrait - it looks like mention of her name alone is not enough.  Happily though, she becomes another one of the 'thousands of people we have never met.'