Turner Prize pulled in record-breaking visitors for Tate Liverpool

Apr 1 2008 by Vicky Anderson, Liverpool Daily Post

HOLDING last year’s Turner Prize in Liverpool gave the competition a new lease of life and helped to put Liverpool on the international map, according to the Tate.

New figures show that it was the best attended exhibition ever held at the gallery, attract-ing some 72,000 visitors from all over the world during its four-month run.

The exhibition, which featured the work of the four finalists Nathan Coley, Zarina Bhimji, Mike Nelson and eventual winner Mark Wallinger, ran from October 2007 to January 2008.

Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper came to the city to announce the winner in a ceremony watch-ed live on Channel 4 by 900,000 people.

Andrea Nixon, executive director of Tate Liverpool, spoke of her delight with the exhibition’s success, and how lessons learned will be implemented again with the forthcoming exhibi-tion of Gustav Klimt which it is hoped will be bigger again.

“It is the best-attended exhibition ever at Tate Liverpool – and it attracted the equiv-alent number of visitors to the prize when it is held in London,” she said.

“From our point of view, to be able to deliver the same volume of visitors just shows there was no point moving it if it was only going to get half the people. And in terms of putting Liverpool on the map, it worked. People would have had to have been really unaware not to know the prize night was here.”

The monthly exit surveys done for the Tate by the Mersey Partnership showed that 54% of visitors to the exhibition were from outside of Merseyside, with 10% from overseas. By that same token, 66% of visitors were from the wider North West region.

Some 41% of people said the Turner Prize exhibition was the main reason they had come to Liverpool, and 35% were people who had never visited the Tate before.

Financially, £450,000 was raised in sponsorship to ensure the exhibition was free to the public, from bodies including the Culture Company, NWDA, the Arts Council and corporate sponsor Metquarter.

More than 25,000 people wrote their opinions in the popular comments room – equating to one in three visitors.

The exhibition tended to attract younger people, with a quarter of visitors all in the 17 to 29 age bracket, with an almost 50/50 gender split.

Ms Nixon said: “I felt it was very Liverpool that people wanted to have a say, and that interest brought a freshness and gave the prize an added extra dimension.

“Liverpool has given the Turner Prize a new lease of life.

“We were thrilled to have Dennis Hopper present the prize and for us it was great that people wanted to be associated with Liverpool in that way.

“The whole spirit of the Turner Prize started a ripple effect,” she explained, citing jokes on television show such as Have I Got News For You, and even when the drummer from Liverpool band the Wombats wore a Mark Wallinger-style bear suit performing at the opening weekend of Capital of Culture events.

“It was a zeitgeist that takes Liverpool all over the world. I hope from the city’s point of view people think it was worth it – we do.

“People asked why hold the prize in 2007 and not 2008, and these statistics show exactly why – so people would see something significant in Liverpool just on the cusp of the Capital of Culture year, and hopefully come back, having seen Liverpool is a treasure house of cultural offerings.”

CULTURE ARTWORK GOES ON DISPLAY: PAGE 9

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