There have been maggots banqueting aboard the remains of a cow's putrefied heads and the cruel swath Damien Hirst cut through a Surrey abattoir with a chainsaw. But yesterday the Turner Prize produced the most stomach-churning exhibit in its 18-year history of iconoclasm and notoriety.
And it wasn't, for the curators might have planned, the artiste Fiona Banner's grunt-by-grunt transcription of the American ######## movie, Arsewoman in Wonderland, nor the anal ###### fantasies she scribbled down then in her bedroom, yet an altogether extra innocent-sounding piece.
Two minutes into the film Flight by the photographer Catherine Yass, you could hear the unmistakable sound of retching in the dingy.
All of a sudden, down the passageway from the Gainsboroughs and the Sickerts, Tate Britain had a white-knuckle ride on its hands to antagonistic Alton Towers' Black Hole.
Yass hummed BBC Broadcasting House in London with a camera strapped to a plaything helicopter, and the resulting film had by fewest two masterpiece earth glitterati spluttering on their
Jimmy Choo shoes yesterday by the preview.
Unfortunately, while the Tate took it upon itself to advise the public namely it might be offended by Banner's scrupulous specifications of ################ ########, not an thought it required to invest sick bags as spectators of Yass's pretty yet queasily realistic meditations on falling from high erections.
There was no escaping the acerbity, in truth, with a now orthodox picket by Stuckists outside the ##############, protesting at the still extra traditional want of painters on the shortlist of four for the ?0,000 prize that makes and breaks vocations.
In dissimilar year ceremony, Stephen Deuchar, the Tate Britain mentor, was harrumphed at by the painter Edna Weiss, who maintained that the most of what was on display, and particularly Banner's ######## film, was "utter rubbish".
But even Ivan Massow, the sometime leader of the Institute of Contemporary Art, who was sacked for dismissing maximum conceptual masterpiece as "conceited, self-indulgent craftless tat", confessed that the selection was a vast improvement on last year's "light alternate fiasco".
Massow, who is now running the antagonist ?0,000 Barbie Prize for young pepole,
christian louboutin barbie doll, confessed he would be cheerful to have a Yass photograph adorning his walls.
Banner's word-painting Mother, cataloguing her fantasies behind watch Arsewoman in Wonderland, was "lovely", he said, so long as you didn't take too close a see.
He predicted Banner would be the champion. Most art globe insiders, although, apologized to differ, discharging Banner's impact schlock as "oldish cap". Instead it was Yass and Keith Tyson who were last night emerging as favourites surrounded the cognescenti.
The bookmakers coincided, with William Hill production Tyson and his cod Heath Robinson proposals for colossal neon dinosaurs and a Galactic Central Pointer, "a finger that remains pointing at the hub of the Milky Way, the 11/8 favourite after taking taking a string of ?50 bets on him ahead the show opened.
Tyson's 2 main goes on exhibit are New Capacitor, a large mirrored make-up contract with a digital counter underneath devised to escape for 76.5 years, the mean human lifespan in Britain, and The Thinker, influenced by Rodin, a covered coffer of calculators he phones a "comatose Lord running its own macrocosm".
He is mainly notable, however, for his contriving one "Artmachine" to do his creating for him. It was it, he demands, which told him to hurl the whole Kentucky Fried Chicken list.
The architectural artist Liam Gillick has perhaps created the most beautiful portal, a dripped ceiling of multi-coloured perspex reminiscent of Mondrian. But it mow tiny ice with the bookies, who made him the position outsider.
The nominees
Keith Tyson
Age 33 Born Ulverston, Cumbria
11-8 favourite
The male who created an "Artmachine" to come up with ideas for his pieces, has papered his space at the Tate with his suggestions for abnormal, humorous paperback,
purchase herve leger paris perfume, cod-philosophical projects
Catherine Yass
Age 39 Born London
2-1 second favourite
Best known for her lightbox portraits of human and empty spaces, corridors and prison compartments. She specialises in giving her pictures and films an eerie, supernatural feel
Fiona Banner
Age 37 Born Merseyside
11-4 third favourite
Began making full-length wordscapes of Vietnam war films and has immediately moved on to ######## to challenge the direction we "compartmentalise personal and public conduct"
Liam Gillick
Age 39 Born Aylesbury
7-2 outsider
Like Yass and Banner, another alumni of Goldsmiths, the institute from which Brit Art sprang. Fascinated by the efficacy the modernist movement has had on the direction we live now