Reuters astounds with Lead-Encased Fried Chicken Menu Artist Wins Turner:
LONDON (Reuters) - Keith Tyson, who found fame with a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu encased in lead, on Sunday won the 2002 Turner Prize with his version of Rodin's "The Thinker."To know her is to love her, I'm sure.
Tyson confirmed the bookies' faith in making him hot favorite to take one of the world's most controversial arts awards, derided by critics as a farce and condemned by Britain's Culture Minister Kim Howells as "conceptual bullshit."
Tyson, whose first solo exhibition was in London in 1995, found fame by feeding data into a computer which then instructed him to paint 366 breadboards and cast a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu in lead.
For Sunday's 20,000 pound ($31,480) prize, he offered a giant black pillar packed with computers.
Tyson beat second favorite Catherine Yass with her vertiginous short films "Descent" and "Flight" as well as outsider Fiona Banner whose offering was the plot of porn movie "Arsewoman in Wonderland" written on a giant canvas.
The tabloids tore into her work, giving Banner the most hostile coverage since Tracey Emin made the Turner shortlist in 1999 with her soiled bed covered in condoms and champagne corks.
Emin's failure to win the prize still clearly rankles. She told the Guardian newspaper on Friday: "The Turner prize is so unfair.
"It was very stupid of me to accept the nomination because there was no chance I was going to win because none of them (the judges) really knew me," she said.
Lucky we don't have many of these aesthetes around here. They seem plumb sensitive and might react poorly to a little criticism.
