There have been maggots banqueting on the remains of a cow's putrefied heads and the bloody swath Damien Hirst slit via a Surrey abattoir with a chainsaw. But yesterday the Turner Prize produced the maximum stomach-churning museum in its 18-year history of iconoclasm and notoriety.
And it wasn't, for the curators might have proposed, the artist Fiona Banner's grunt-by-grunt transcription of the American ######## membrane, Arsewoman in Wonderland, neither the anal ###### fantasies she scribbled down afterwards in her bedroom, merely one wholly extra innocent-sounding piece.
Two minutes into the membrane Flight at the photographer Catherine Yass, you could listen the unmistakable sound of retching in the black.
All of a sudden, down the passageway from the Gainsboroughs and the Sickerts, Tate Britain had a white-knuckle ride above its hands apt antagonist Alton Towers' Black Hole.
Yass buzzed BBC Broadcasting House in London with a camera caned to a doll aircraft, and the resulting movie had at fewest 2 art earth glitterati spluttering aboard their
Jimmy Choo shoes yesterday by the preview.
Unfortunately, meantime the Tate took it upon itself to advise the public that it might be offended along Banner's careful specifications of ################ ########, not 1 thought it necessary to invest sick bags because spectators of Yass's smart but queasily naturalistic meditations on falling from tall buildings.
There was not escaping the acerbity,
vibram five fingers bikila 2010, in truth, with a immediately orthodox picket along Stuckists outdoor the ##############, protesting at the still more traditional lack of painters on the shortlist of four for the ?0,000 award that makes and crashes vocations.
In variant annual ritual, Stephen Deuchar, the Tate Britain manager, was harrumphed at by the painter Edna Weiss, who retained that the most of what was on exhibit, and particularly Banner's ######## movie, was "absolute nonsense".
But even Ivan Massow, the former leader of the Institute of Contemporary Art, who was sacked for dismissing most conceptual art for "pretentious, self-indulgent craftless tat",
Miu Miu Purple Sandal, conceded that the culling was a extensive improvement on final year's "light switch fiasco".
Massow, who is now running the rival ?0,000 Barbie Prize for youth pepole, admitted he would be cheerful to have a Yass photograph adorning his walls.
Banner's word-painting Mother, cataloguing her fantasies after watch Arsewoman in Wonderland, was "lovely", he said, so long as you didn't take also near a see.
He predicted Banner would be the winner. Most masterpiece earth insiders, however, apologized to dissimilar, dismissing Banner's impact schlock as "oldish hat". Instead it was Yass and Keith Tyson who were final night emerging as favourites among the cognescenti.
The bookmakers coincided, with William Hill production Tyson and his cod Heath Robinson propositions for colossal neon dinosaurs and a Galactic Central Pointer, "a finger that remains pointing at the center of the Milky Way, the 11/8 favourite after catching taking a string of ?50 bets on him ahead the show opened.
Tyson's two cardinal goes on display are New Capacitor, a great mirrored make-up compact with a digital adverse underneath devised to run for 76.5 years, the mean person lifespan in Britain, and The Thinker, inspired by Rodin, a covered bank of calculators he cries a "comatose god running its own universe".
He namely chiefly famous, although, for his contriving an "Artmachine" to do his creating for him. It was it, he claims, which told him to actors the entire Kentucky Fried Chicken list.
The architectural artiste Liam Gillick has perhaps built the most beautiful entry, a dripped dome of multi-coloured perspex reminiscent of Mondrian. But it cut mini ice with the bookies, who made him the position outsider.
The candidates
Keith Tyson
Age 33 Born Ulverston, Cumbria
11-8 favourite
The male who built one "Artmachine" to appear up with fancies for his pieces, has papered his space at the Tate with his propositions for eccentric, funny paperback, cod-philosophical projects
Catherine Yass
Age 39 Born London
2-1 second favourite
Best known for her lightbox portraits of folk and blank spaces, corridors and jail cells. She specialises in giving her pictures and films an eerie, marvelous feel
Fiona Banner
Age 37 Born Merseyside
11-4 third favourite
Began production full-length wordscapes of Vietnam combat films and has now shook on to ######## to challenge the path we "compartmentalise private and public behaviour"
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 activity has had on the way we live now