I’m not an artist or designer but I’ve worked on specialist antiques-related newspapers and magazines and known some excellent graphic designers. As I’ve visited many antiques fairs (shows), exhibitions and galleries, I have been exposed to good and bad art and think I know the difference – maybe!

On Squidoo, I’ve written about some great artists and designers like Charles Rennie Macintosh, William Morris, and Susie Cooper and I couldn’t find a group for designers and design. This is why I decided to start the Squidoo Art and Design Group.

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Art and Design Group

I run an Art and Design Group on Squidoo. I clearly set out the criteria for membership right at the top of the page. A lens must have relevant content and not be just copied from Wikipedia and it should be well illustrated.  It mustn’t be just a prolonged plug  for a Clickbank product.

This doesn’t seem difficult to understand but so many people either don’t understand or they don’t bother to read the criteria.

Over the last week I’ve looked at about a dozen lenses that have applied to join the group. Most of them had very little or nothing at all to do with art or design. The lensmasters  must have thought that, because they had some pictures on them, they automatically qualified. Others were just plugging their Zazzle stores where they were selling stuff with designs they had done themselves. In some cases, this would be fair enough. Unfortunately, the ones I’ve seen recently have all been very derivative. They have also done two or three designs, then shown what seems like an endless list of products, all using these same few designs on them.

Having said all that, there are some great lenses in the group. Take a look at this one, Cheryl Craig, Aboriginal Artist to see some great art  by an artist who is descended from the Wiradjuri people in Australia.

Now have a look at these brilliant chess sets, designed and sculpted by Frankie, the lensmaster who has written about them. Then there is The Louvre: Essential, Little Known Tourist Tips which was chosen as Lens of the Day last year. The lensmaster, Margo Arrowsmith, uses her personal experience to give prospective visitors to the Louvre tips for getting the most out of their visit.

There are also several tutorials on different techniques. You can go through step by step instructions on drawing birds complete with detailed feathers using coloured pencils or doing an airbrush drawing of a wolf.

These are just a few of the brilliant lenses in the Art and Design Group. It’s obvious that some people who apply to join, not only do not read the criteria for membership but don’t even bother to check out any of the lenses or they would see that their own were not acceptable.

Over the years, the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize entrants and winners have attracted public derision and disbelief. Each year, people assured each other they could have done better art than that on show at the Tate for the competition.

Trevor Prideaux, organiser of the Turnip Prize, started the annual competition when Tracey Emin’s Unmade Bed won the Turner Prize in 1999. You can see his point – most of us have done similar works of art – every morning in fact. Of course, we don’t think about the meaning of our unmade beds and explain it to art experts so they could write learned pieces explaining it to the rest of us and telling us why an unmade bed is such great art.

Don’t think the Turnip Prize doesn’t have strict criteria for entry. There have been disqualifications for works that aren’t of the required standard. Some of them were too good and too much effort had been put in to producing them.

When the competition was announced in 1999, it was plainly stated, “You can enter anything you like, but it must be rubbish,” so people who produce work that is too good only have themselves to blame when it’s disqualified. One year, the most famous piece ever to be disqualified might or might not have been by famous graffitti artist Banksy. It was a stencil of the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher firing a turnip. It wasn’t eligible for the competition because obviously too much effort and thought had gone into its production.

The prize has just been award for 2008 and it went to 69 year old Ivor Prance with his Fleeced and consisted of a piece of sheep’s wool which he picked off some barbed wire near his home. He said, “The work took no time at all to create.” He won the coveted trophy, a turnip stuck on a 6 inch nail.

The competition takes place each year at the New Inn, in the village of Wedmore, Somerset (south west England). If you want to enter, then it will have to be November 2009. Don’t spend time thinking about your entry or making it because, if you do, it will probably be disqualified. See the rules on The Turnip Prize.

Other winning entries:

1999 – Alfred The Grate (two burned rolls on a fire grate)

2000 – Minstrel Cycle (a bicyclemade from sweets, cocktail sticks and Tampons)

2001 and 2002 the competition was cancelled.

2003 – Take a Leaf out of my Chook (A raw chicken stuffed with leaves)

2004 – Jellied Deal, A wobbly jelly with submerged playing cards.

2005 – Birds Flew (An empty birds’ nest with a box of flu remedy)

2006 – Torn Beef (empty corned beef can)

2007 – Tea P (Used tea bags in the shape of a P)