Knock knock. Who’s there? Turner Prize. Turner Prize who?

As I left the press pack at the doors of the Towner Eastbourne and walked back to the train station, I couldn’t shake my disappointment with the Turner Prize. I had this nagging feeling that I’d missed out on something big. Sure, I’d had a good time. The PRs had done a good job. They’d got about fifty of us out to the south coast town to see the preview. It’s no mean feat dragging that many journalists outside of the M25. And fair play to the gallery, it’s a good venue, and they serve a good lunch. But the Turner Prize used to be so much more than a networking event.

Everyone agrees the glory days were the 1990s, when Nicholas Serota was in charge, the Young British Artists were actually young, and Channel 4 footed the bill. Heavy drinking, indoor smoking, celebrity guests (Madonna 2001, Yoko Ono 2006), live primetime coverage of the award ceremony and extensive post-prize analysis ensured the Turner Prize was ripe for speculation, controversy, and outrage. The prize was a talking point beyond the art world – it used to be covered in tabloids, people used to bet on it – and the art was genuinely provocative; Damien Hirst once showed a dead shark; this year felt like a damp squib.

It’s not like the artists nominated this year haven’t tried, they cover a lot of ground – identity and injustice, work and precarity, care and mental health, nationalism and decline – it’s just that nothing hit home. Take Barbara Walker’s charcoal portraits. They show people affected by the Windrush Scandal and the documents they used to prove their identity. The entire episode is an historic injustice, but Walker’s drawings fell short of a real memorial. People have had to reduce their lives to scraps of paper, and Walker does the same. At the end of the show Walker will erase these drawings, I don’t think this’ll be read as the radical gesture she intends.

Next to this, Ghislaine Leung’s moveable, changeable installations felt lacking: a fountain to drown out all noise; ducting pipes reclaimed from a demolished Belgian art gallery; toys borrowed from a local library. They’re actually made by gallery technicians following short poem-like instructions Leung calls ‘scores’. They’re an attempt to connect the gallery space to the outside world, but they stubbornly refuse. It’s art about art, and if half the work is in its construction, then all that viewers are left with is half the art.

Rory Pilgrim’s hour-long, seven-part oratorio RAFTS was created through collaboration and workshops with eight residents of Barking and Dagenham. Together, they used the metaphor of the raft to ask “what keeps us afloat in uncertain times?” The project ticks all the boxes: community engagement; mental health struggles; and ill-defined activism. But it’s cliched and infantilising, like a school play or a spoken word poetry ad.

Jesse Darling filled the gallery with elongated and bent metal crowd control barriers. Faded glass vitrines. Ceremonial hammers wrapped with dried flowers. A maypole of rusted metal and anti-pigeon spikes, wrapped with safety tape. Mock union jacks made from dishcloths and mounted proudly on crumbling concrete pillars. Rollercoaster tracks burst through the wall of the gallery and lie limp on the floor – there’s no fun to be had here. It might be on the nose, but this is what life in Britain feels like. Darling has made a fitting monument for a dreary, decaying country.

In one sense, the Turner Prize doesn’t exist to recognise artists. It exists, in its words, to, “promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art.” That’s the problem, there are no new developments and no public debate, they’re just restating things we can all agree on: justice is important, art can be collaborative, we should care about people, and modern life is a bit crap. Perhaps it feels so surface-level because it’s a poor imitation of the discourse of recent years. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine prompted questions and debate with real urgency. Art used to write the headlines, now it just follows them.

On the train home I thought about how it could revive something of that 1990s spirit. As I left Victoria Station, I found an answer: William Hill. I put a tenner on Darling at 2/1. The winner is announced on 5th December. I guess we’ll find out then. And, Jesse, if you’re reading this, we’ll split our winnings 50/50.