Yorkshire Sculpture Park is Museum of the Year

I love the idea of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park -- an old estate with 500 rural acres you can wander around enjoying art. Many people love the place, and the announcement that the YSP has been named Museum of the Year by the ArtFund has been roundly cheered in Britain. The place manages to be both cutting edge and highly popular, respected but also fun.

Some of the landscape is a garden, some of it pasture and woodland.

Sadly, it mainly displays the kind of abstract and conceptual art that leaves me completely cold. Like this, Barbara Hepworth's The Family of Man (1970), one of the most famous pieces in the permanent collection.

Or this, Eduardo Paolozzi, Collage City, 1975. Yawn.

And what modern collection would be complete without something big and ugly by Henry Moore?

But this is cool -- Michael Ayrton, The Arkville Minotaur, 1968/69.

I very much like this monumental head by Igor Mitoraj.

And this William Turnbull piece, Ancestral Figure, is an interesting modern take on a Bronze Age stela.

Andy Goldsworthy, one of my favorite artists, has done several installations there.

This work by Sophie Ryder is kind of cute.

And this photograph by the mysterious Walking Person shows that in the right atmosphere even a tedious abstract metal thing can be interesting.