The indignant visitor was once as much a staple of the Turner Prize as the pretentious descriptions and overpriced reproductions. Round she went (it was usually a ‘she’) unfavourably comparing the works on display with the daubs of an infant relative and disdaining any art which had the affront to be conceptual. In quite a few years, when work seemed to have been selected to shock, one couldn’t help agreeing with her. In most years the affronted reaction of visitors was rather more entertaining than the Prize itself. So it is with great sadness that I must report that the Prize-going crowd of this Tuesday afternoon were enjoying themselves no end. For this year the shortlisted artists all seemed to have created ‘proper’ art with ‘proper’ themes – and gosh it is dull.

Dexter Dalwood comes the closest of all the artists to courting controversy in his painting Death of David Kelly, in which a tree and log teeter precariously against a uniform blue background. (Yes: move aside paedophilia and elephant dung, this year’s Turner Prize for most controversial picture goes to a tree.) It’s a highly proficiently painted tree, and similar proficiency is apparent in White Flag. Yet Dexter’s style, of incorporating pieces of found iconic art history imagery into new settings, serves to create a paint-by-numbers approach to political allegory. In White Flag, Jasper John’s 1955 White Flag is metamorphosed into the concrete wall of a Middle Eastern compound, a painfully forced metaphor for the rather tired theme of American imperialism.

I was relieved to see that the Turner Prize staple of pretentious curatorial descriptions lives in the second room, displaying work by the Otolith Group. The Otolith Group, I was informed, "question the nature of documentary history across time by using material found within a range of disciplines". In pretension this description paled into insignificance when compared with the turgidly awful quotes on the wall: "The mindlessness of power sometimes creates a memory from what was meant to be amnesia." Answers on a postcard please.

All this hot air served to obscure Inner Time of Television, a simultaneous showing on 13 TV sets of The Owl’s Legacy, Chris Marker’s 13-part television documentary series on Ancient Greece. There was something rather fascinating about watching the rows of expert talking heads as each spoke on a different aspect of Greek culture. Yet enjoyable though this was, I wasn’t particularly sure why the artists felt that Marker’s series, made in 1989, was relevant to now.

After two rooms of uninspiring art Angela de la Cruz’ Super Clutter XXL (Pink and Brown) came as a startling revelation. Taking a canvas painted in brown and angel delight pink she had so crushed the wooden canvas stretcher as to render it into the crude shape of a human body. Any girl who has ever tried to force herself into a dress will recognise the impression of a bust which is spilling out in soft canvas folds while the taut brown canvas of the lower body splits, revealing ‘knees’ made out of the wooden frame. For Super Clutter XXL (Pink and Brown) alone de la Cruz deserves to win.

Susan Philipsz’s work, Lowlands, where three unsynchronised speakers played the artist singing a Scottish ballad, really summed up the Turner Prize this year. There was nothing particularly wrong with it and there was nothing particularly right with it. There were no disasters à la Hirst at the Wallace collections, but equally, with the exception of Super Clutter XXL (Pink and Brown), one suspects that there was nothing that will be remembered in ten years’ time. So I make a plea I thought I would never make: enough of this dullness, bring back the porn and pickled sharks.

 

The Turner Prize exhibition will run until 3rd January and the winner will be announced on 6th December.