Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.

Noel Coward (1899-1973)

I'd Like -

I'd like to know
what this whole show
is all about
before it's out.

Piet Hein (1905-1996)

If there's one thing I know, it's men. I ought to. It's been my life's work.
Marie Dressler – Dinner at Eight

If you want to give me a present, give me a good life.
Raymond Massey – East of Eaden

I could see you looking very handsome and successful in a dark blue flannel suit.
Grace Kelly – Rear Window

I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
Orson Welles – The Lady from Shanghai

You keep your mouth shut if you don't want it slaped shut.
Albert Dekker – The Killers

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)

The Mystery of Pain

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886)

You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.
Ernest Borgnine – Marty

When you get inside my head, see if you can find any sense in it.
Bette Davis – Dark Victory

I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.
Gene Kelly – Inherit the Wind

I was taught to think about love in Chinese.
Rita Hayworth – The Lady from Shanghai

If you want fresh air, don't look for it in this town.
Anthony Caruso – The Asphalt Jungle

After much anticipation the Turner Prize was awarded to a man that’s been invariably described as 'a thumping bore’. British press can be a cruel lot but by God they aren’t wrong. Simon Starling’s personality, or rather lack thereof, could be overlooked if his work had momentum but as it turns out it hasn’t even artistic base, never mind momentum. To simply dismiss Starling’s ‘research-based-conceptual-art’ as a pile of shite would be easy, even easier to apply this assessment to the rest of the Turner Prize gang. But to complacently say that modern art is simple thus ‘anyone can do it’ would be a little infantile and every bit as foolish as the conceptual artists whose ‘concepts’ are plain daft. In this instant it’s imperative to look at why their work, individually as collectively, resembles a steaming pile of shit.

First, this year’s winner Simon Starling who seems a lovely fella; the kind that never forgets mother’s day cards, blushes coyly in the glaring spotlight and says thank you very much to the caterers after the show. In a word, bland. As is his work. His exhibits were two; Shedboatshed and Tabernas Desert Run. The former was a shed that Starling dismantled, turned into a boat, sailed down the Rhine and then turned back into a shed. The latter an electric bicycle, fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen, which Starling rode through a desert. And that ladies and gentlemen won this unassuming ‘genius’ £25 000. Words fail me.

Next up, Darren Almond; an artiste with a fractured consciousness of a working class kid who has ‘made it’. His video installation If I Had You consisted of four screens; on one was a splashing fountain; on another the face of Almond's widowed grandmother; on the third, the feet of a dancing couple; on the fourth turned the brightly lit sails of a windmill. And the point? Something to do with memories, frankly a photo album would have been more handy.

The third, and only female, nominee was Gillian Carnegie; an ambitious painter, of mildly-cultivated skill, her subject; nudes, landscapes and abstracts, all of which seemed nice enough, but nothing more. A little lackluster, a little bovine but a little better than the previous two.

Lastly, Jim Lambie; the one that was tipped to walk away with the £25,000 cheque, but didn’t. The trendy one with a Liam Gallagher haircut and vintage Levis. His installation called The Kinks, like the band but nowhere near as brilliant, was conceived and built two days before the exhibition. Perhaps that explains the utter shambles, though I’m not convinced. See if you can figure it out; 3 jumbo bird figurines, the kind you’d find on your gran’s mantle or a souvenir shop in Bornemouth, adorned with glitzy handbags and haphazardly splashed-on paint, centered on a podium covered in black and white vinyl tape. Confused? So was I. The whole exhibit seemed like some psycho-traumatic childhood nightmare with conjectural emphasis on birds, le style de Hitchcock. In short, it wasn’t good.

So there you have it. This is what they call modern art. And there was me thinking art was meant to stimulate and excite. Looking at the soporific work on display I felt bored to the point of mental paralysis. But it is difficult to fully convey or even begin to lambaste the state of modern art. It is best described as purposeless. But perhaps that’s the whole point. As Nietzsche once said ‘We invented the concept of purpose, in reality purpose is lacking.’ Perhaps art like life doesn’t need, or indeed have, a purpose, after all one is said to imitate the other.