Badge Jonathan Jones on Art Blog

Katie Paterson's award-winning Fossil Necklace will fail the test of history

Arts prizes are nothing without controversy – but this South Bank Sky Arts award-winning piece represents all that is safe, slight and of the establishment
South Bank Sky Arts Awards - Winners Room
Paterson with presenter Gavin Turk at the South Bank Sky Arts awards. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty Images

A necklace of polished stones hangs in a small darkened room at the Wellcome Collection in London. Its colourful arrangement of rocks is easy on the eye. What's it all about?

Outside the viewing chamber is a key to Katie Paterson's artwork Fossil Necklace. Each glittering pebble is actually a polished fossil, and together they amount to a chart of evolution – in the form of a necklace.

Interesting. Interesting-ish anyway. But a prizewinner?

Paterson this week picked up the visual art award at the South Bank Sky Arts awards.

Prizes are only worth anyone's time if they are controversial. Handing down honours is otherwise a dead establishment game. The value of a work of art will be decided by history, not award ceremonies. The Turner and Booker prizes and the Oscars at least have the merit that they spark debate about everything from the future of the novel to the responsibilities of art. The controversies are much more interesting than the actual prizes, which are just the rough draft of a rough draft of history's verdict.

And the South Bank Awards fail the controversy test. They don't cause any arguments. They are handed down from above and reported with dull respect. So I apologise to Katie Paterson, but I am going to give her the Turner prize treatment: let's have a controversy. Is she really that special? What's her work about and why should it be elevated above all other aspiring art?

Paterson is fascinated by science. Her conceptual art finds everyday analogies for profound cosmological themes. Anyway, that's what her fans will tell you. She's certainly consistent in exploring scientific themes through contemporary art: her works have ranged from sending a "second moon" around the earth by courier service, to playing a record at the speed of the earth's rotation.

Katie Paterson's Fossil necklace Katie Paterson's Fossil necklace. Photograph: Martin John Callanan

Ok, but it strikes me there is an obvious flaw in her art. It does not work on the terms it sets itself. Her metaphors are too slight to say much about either nature, or humanity's passion to understand it.

Let's look again at that Fossil Necklace. The object is pretty. But it suggests nothing much about geological time. It is a polished artefact, no more profound than any other necklace (all jewels are geological wonders, after all). Only when you look at the written key does the meaning become apparent – and then it raises the wrong sorts of questions, like, er, why put this knowledge into a necklace? Those fossils would be more interesting and informative if they were left in their original forms instead of being polished up into meaningless pebbles.

So is she making a point about the geological industry wrecking fossils? About the irony that jewels turn knowledge into dumb beauty? I don't think so.

We are meant to think that Fossil Necklace is a thought-provoking image of the immensity of time and the human brain's inability to comprehend it.

But this is too simple and fragile a message to give a work of art power. Art needs to be richer and more complex than this (or more succinct). As it is, Paterson's work is a brittle mixture of the didactic and the lighthearted.

Institutions love this art because it fits some deep need they have, right now, for art that is both trendily conceptual and reassuringly intellectual. That combination allows museums and respectable prizegivers to feel they are down with the kids, while also furthering their liberal mission to educate the public.

So Paterson gets a show in academic Cambridge, is championed by the learned Wellcome Collection and wins the South Bank Award. Doubtless she will get shortlisted for the Turner Prize. How will her ideas fare in that cruel forum?

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