Tate – SpecNews

UK’s Top Art Award, the Turner Prize, Won by Architecture Project for Derelict Houses

The UK’s Turner Prize for 2015 has been won by Assemble, a collective group of architects that has restored derelict houses.
The Turner is the leading award in British contemporary art, and arguably Europe’s most prestigious contemporary visual art prize, and Assemble is its first winner from the architecture and design field.
Alex Farquharson, director of Nottingham Contemporary, has been appointed the new director of Tate Britain.
Assemble was nominated both for this “Granby Four Streets” project as well as others.
The total prize pool for the Turner is £40,000 (about $60,300).

The Cass is named after Sir John Cass, who established one of London’s oldest education charities with a historical mandate to found a polytechnic institute at Aldgate to serve the population of east London.
As Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, has said, it is essential to develop the skills of making through hands-on learning.
We should know by now that learning is not restricted to the purely academic: making is also learning.
We, the undersigned, call on London Metropolitan University to review its current strategic plan, One Campus, One Community, in light of its consequences for the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design.
We call on London Metropolitan to pursue a two-site solution that keeps the education of art, making and design alive and kicking where The Cass began – in London’s East End.

The last British Art Show was the best so far.
AS
The dynamism, unexpectedness and sheer abundance of the art market makes these art fairs a window on the new – and the old.
Jonathan Jones
Groundbreaking attempt to place pop art in its global context or another rehash of familiar names and images?
This long-overdue survey should allow us to focus more on the art, less on the man.
The spiritual art of the past echoes in his work – martyrs, triptychs, meditation, all that sacred jazz.