Landscape, or meatscape?

The Glover Prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious art awards.  However, its latest winner has upset several apple-carts by his irreverent approach to the field.

A Tasmanian artist has won a prestigious landscape prize with a painting of a hunk of meat sitting on a bed of mashed potatoes with peas and gravy.

Hobart local Robert O’Connor won the Glover Art Prize for his painting ‘Somewhere near Oatlands’.

“It’s fun to try and disrupt a landscape prize by entering a hunk of meat into it,” he said.

“I was just trying to amuse myself really.”

. . .

While some love his piece, others are not convinced … “This makes a mockery of the Glover Prize, a mockery of landscape artists and a mockery of our intelligence,” Karen Bindoff said … Ruth Clarke said: “The Glover Prize has lost its way. Glover painted beautiful landscapes — landscapes.  The piece that has been selected for the prize is an obscene joke, what is the art world come to put such rubbish as beauty.”

Others were drooling at the work:  “Luscious pastoral landscape, to die for! Congrats well deserved award,” Sara Lindsay said.

. . .

After overcoming his initial shock, the artist said he would spend the [A$50,000 prize] money on groceries.

“I can always get an exhibition together; this will help me eat food,” he said.

There’s more at the link.

Australians in general have always been known for irreverence and disrespect for authority – “taking the piss“, to use a well-known British Colonial expression.  I’m glad to see that extends to the art field as well!

Peter