ABOVE: Simon Starling’s jury-rigged hydrogen moped, part of his work Tabernas Desert Run, in turn part of his Turner Prize-winning installation. Sayeth the Telegraph: “meh.”

Blowback from the Turner announcement on Monday continues to roll in; The Telegraph’s take on it today focuses less on Simon Starling and the goodness/badness/indifference of his shed-and-bicycle derived works, but contemplates the total mainstreaming of the whole modern art movement. Non-winner Darren Almond’s interview with Channel 4 on Monday night, says Mark Hudson, had all the grit and revolutionary panache of a Jamie Oliver kindergarten Christmas Special (the interview was actually filmed in Almond’s catalogue-photogenic kitchen). Where’s the spitting in the face of convention? Where’s the countercultural angst?

Hudson recounts an anecdote (which sounds made-up to us, but still amusing) in which painter Stuart Davis presents Picasso with a petition asking for more acceptance of modern art among American establishmentarians. Picasso refused, saying that acceptance would defang modernism of its killer instinct. As the 2005 Turner award was given out on live TV with millions watching, it seems safe to say that contemporary art—some of it, anyway—has been accepted by the mainstream. But does that spell its death?

LINK: Telegraph > What’s really shocking about modern art