Review: Best in Show
Originally published in A-N Magazine, October 2008

The stated aim of Best in Show is to present works by the brightest of this year’s UK art graduates. If this sounds familiar, it may be due to the numerous other exhibitions making exactly the same claim – most notably the rather more grand Bloomsburg New Contemporaries. Do we need another one? In fact, do we need any of them?

Presumably it all makes sense to those involved, blundering on under the notion that artworks produced by the young should be given a public platform at every possible opportunity. A degree show is not nearly enough. The work of graduates must be thrust “out there”, or else how will they catch the attention of The 3 C’s: Curators, Critics and Collectors?

This has everything to do with the “artworld” as a vocational field, and nothing to do with enjoyment of art. Which leaves a general audience at a loss. Perhaps we’re meant to be grateful for yet another sprawling exhibition of formative (and mostly immature) works with no curatorial unity, no thematic context, and no history to any of the artists because, lest we forget, they’re all youngsters freshly delivered from their respective educational institutions.

The press release for Best in Show sets off a chorus of alarm bells with its mind-numbingly predictable emphasis on (and optimistic self-comparisons to) Freeze. That’s right, 20 years later, and fantasising about being the next Damien Hirst is still the number one habit of artworld wannabes running high on ambition and dry on imagination.

Worse still is the photograph accompanying the press-release on the John Jones Project Space website. In what can only have been a paroxysm of self-promoting egomania, the two young curators have chosen not to use an image of the art itself to represent the exhibition, preferring a photograph of themselves. Ney, themselves with name tags. The depths of curatorial vanity have officially been plumbed.

This is where Best in Show drops dead and eats its own corpse. Not only is it conceived as a cattle-market prize-winners’ pageant for recent graduates, but it is itself a vanity project curated by two more still-fairly-recent graduates referring to themselves as a “curatorial agency”. What, like a job agency? Because being an artist means entering a big competition to win a career - right?

Wrong, but that’s the idea that underpins (and undermines) all best-of graduate exhibitions, and it’s why they’re a waste of time for audiences. We deserve to see art works zinging off each other in intelligently curated combinations based on the particular qualities of the art itself, not bundled together according to an arbitrary factor such as the artists’ educational stage.

For art students, the very existence of these shows perpetuates an individualistic career-fixated myth of art practice that obscures the true value of art education: its wide-ranging potential.

A degree in Fine Art can feed into any number of creative professions. Very few art graduates go on to become “artists” in the narrowest gallery-based sense, and it’s idiotic to encourage students to think of their creative potential in those terms, or audiences to judge them as such. For that reason, Best in Show lost my vote from the start.

"Best in Show" is on view at the John Jones Project Space until 31 October 2008.