[originaltext] One of Britain’s most prestigious awards for artwork has gone

One of Britain’s most prestigious awards for artwork has gone to a sculptor who is noted for pouring concrete into old houses. Rachel Whiteread was awarded the Turner Prize for the best artistic work over the past year. But as VOA’s Gill Butler reports from London, Ms. Whiteread also won the first K Prize for the worst artistic work over the past year.
   "In tradition-minded Britain the Turner Prize is often controversial and no more so than this year. In addition to Ms. Rachel Whiteread’s casts of the interiors of old houses due for demolition, the judges also considered a work that consisted of a room filled with seven metric tons of rice lit by pink neon lights. Even that would have trouble equaling one of the entries in last year’s Turner Prize competition--it was a display of 37 fish inside glass cases."
   In awarding Ms. Whiteread the Turner Prize, Lord Polumbo, Chairman of the British Arts Council spoke of the ridicule nontradltional artists face.:" The artist exploring the new is liable to derision and hostility. The new is always shocking, but there is nothing new about that."
   The newspapers here have had a lot of fun with the Turner Prize. The conservative Daily Mail headlined "Disaster in Plaster". The very serious Independent had a front page story headlined" Turner Prize won by worst artist". The Times approach was similar "Turner’s best equals the worst". What both were referring to is the fact that in addition to a $ 30,000 Turner Prize for the year’s best work, Rachel Whiteread won $ 60,000 from something called the K Foundation for, in its view, producing the worst art of the past twelve months. The K Foundation was started by a millionaire rock-and-roll group. A Foundation spokesman said the idea was to point out what he called the hypocrisy of all these awards".
   As far as Ms. Whiteread was concerned, the most distressing event of the evening wasn’t the spoof a- ward as worst artist; it was the fact that her major work, a concrete casting called　"house", is to be demolished at the order of the local governing council in East London at the end of this month.