This year’s polite Turner Prize show is so nice that it’s hard to hate it

Britain’s biggest art prize has got Eastbourne excited. The way the annual show has been embraced by the community is more powerful than the work itself, writes Mark Hudson

The Towner Eastbourne (The Turner Prize 2023)

I went to Eastbourne, home of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition, with the intention of tearing a strip off this year’s shortlist for a polite selection of artists and a suffocating surrounding discourse. Yet a few hours in this once fustiest of seaside resorts gave me a whole new insight into the purpose of the Turner – and art itself – in the post-Covid world.

The Towner Eastbourne is a pleasant modern building set just a block back from the seafront in this formerly uber-genteel retirement resort. Despite a bold abstract mural by German artist Lothar Gotz, its relaxed ambience feels closer to that of a community library than a cutting-edge art hub. Eastbourne itself, meanwhile, has moved on hugely from its stuffy mid-20th image as stolidly white and Tory. As I make my way from the station, its streets, shops and restaurants are filled with a broad range of early 21st-century British humanity – though most admittedly on the more senior side. Towner’s gallery spaces are crowded with people, all appearing very alert and stimulated at being in the exhibition for Britain’s biggest art prize on its very first day of opening.

I have to admit, though, that my first impression on seeing the shortlist was that it was a bit of a mixed bag that didn’t reveal much about the state of British art in the aftermath of the biggest collective challenge of recent times.