Is the Turner Prize Relevant Today?

The Turner Prize celebrates its 40th edition this year, having survived a fraught period of acting as a lightning rod for British media discussions about the nature and purpose of contemporary art. The noise around the prize – inescapable during the 1990s, when Damien Hirst’s divided cows (1995), Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung paintings (1998) and Tracey Emin’s unmade bed (1999) featured on its shortlist – has died down. This is an indicator not just of the diminishing returns of aiming to shock conservative publications and critics, but of the British art world no longer capturing significant attention from a media that has made less and less space for the arts since the turn of the millennium.

The mechanics of the award – named after the British painter J.M.W. Turner – have remained constant since its inception in 1984. Several artists, born or living in the UK (usually individuals, but occasionally duos or collectives), are nominated for an exhibition from the past year. The jury members, selected by Tate, choose a four-artist shortlist from their own suggestions and those made by the public, although judge Lynn Barber, writing in the Guardian in 2006, suggested that the jury paid little attention to public nominations. The winner is awarded GB£25,000 – a less significant sum today than when it was set 20 years ago, which may be one of the reasons why the Prize seems to capture less media attention than it once did. Between 1991, after a year’s hiatus due to a lack of sponsors, and 2016, when the rule was dropped, only artists under 50 could be nominated. This both heightened the sense that the prize represented – and promoted – new trends in British visual art, and augmented the tension with those who found them incomprehensible.

During the prize’s heyday, this incomprehension spurred a number of alternative awards. In 1993, the K Foundation, co-founded by Jimmy Caulty and Bill Drummond of the situationist-inspired pop group The KLF, named Rachel Whiteread ‘worst artist of the year’ the day after she won the Turner Prize. A decade later, ultra-conservative British newspaper Daily Mail launched its short-lived Not the Turner Prize for ‘traditional canvases’ – perhaps in response to the small number of painters who have won.

Twenty years later, however, when Jesse Darling became the first transgender artist to win the prize in 2023, the Daily Mail published a long, and surprisingly even-handed, article about the work by Emily Jane Davies. While many of the newspaper’s readers likely got themselves worked up about an artist who criticised former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in their acceptance speech and waved the Palestinian flag at the award ceremony, the furious op-eds about what sort of ‘degenerate’ would consider making work out of tattered union-jack bunting seem to be a thing of the past.

Yet, there had already been signs of a shift in attitude towards the prize – if not from the wider public, then certainly within the artworld itself. In 2019, after a decade of Conservative austerity and with a pivotal general election looming, the judges accepted a request by the four nominated artists – Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – to share the prize in a gesture of solidarity. At the award ceremony, which was televised by the BBC, Shani sported a large necklace with the slogan ‘Tories Out’ – a forthright political gesture that, in years past, might have generated substantial outrage.

Along with a debacle earlier that year in which a sponsorship deal with Stagecoach South East was scrapped due to the company’s owner, Brian Souter, historically supporting a law to ban UK councils from ‘promoting homosexuality’, this collective act of award-sharing raised further questions about what the prize meant and to whom. The Independent’s art critic, Mark Hudson, believed that the ‘prize had put itself out of business’ by allowing the four shortlisted artists to share the accolades.

In May 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic making it impossible to organize the usual exhibition, the Turner Prize committee instead awarded bursaries of GB£10,000 to ten artists, including Liz Johnson Artur and Imran Perretta. The following year, in recognition of the role art and artists had played in helping communities through lockdown, five artist collectives were shortlisted, with Belfast-based Array Collective winning for a work that dealt with the centenary of the partition of Ireland and contemporary queer culture.

Since 2022, the Turner Prize has righted itself from the internal shock of the artists refusing the idea of a winner, by returning to its conventional format. While the award has always represented different types of work, the shortlists have become more diverse, featuring more women, LGBTQ+ artists and people of colour than in the 1980s or ’90s, including this year’s nominees: Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas. An admirable effort has also been made to decentralize the prize geographically and demographically. The exhibitions are no longer held only in London, instead alternating annually between the capital and other UK cities, with next year’s edition being held in Bradford, the UK’s 2025 City of Culture.

The issue is that the Turner Prize is supposed to catapult artists to a higher profile and, whilst it might do so within the art world, it no longer seems capable of propelling them beyond it. Nor will it be able to do so without sweeping changes to the British media infrastructure, or improved access to and education about the arts – the value of shocking the uninitiated only ever has diminishing returns, after all. Although the prize retains something of its main function – providing artists with financial support – it remains in search of wider social relevance. Whether it is able to rediscover that relevance – by design or even by chance – remains to be seen.

The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain until 16 February 2025, with the winner announced on 3 December 2024 

^{Main image: Jasleen Kaur, Sociomobile (detail), 2021, installation view. Courtesy: Getty Images; photograph: Tristan Fewings}