Nigel Reynolds looks at the works of artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize
THIS is the wonderful world of the 1997 Turner Prize. Conceptual art, where "the idea", not the medium, is the message, has finally killed off painting in the race for Britain's most controversial contemporary art award.
An exhibition of the works of the four shortlisted artists - Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, Cornelia Parker and Gillian Wearing - opens at the Tate Gallery in London today. The winner will pick up £20,000.
There is not a painting in sight. Among the exhibits the public will be confronted with are a huge pile of cocaine, a video of a woman violently shaking her semi-naked daughter, charred timbers from a Baptist church, clippings of a balding man's hair and two earplugs made from dust collected at St Paul's Cathedral.
A protest group calling itself the New Metaphysical Movement said it would picket the show today. The group claims that the prize besmirches the name of J M W Turner, a painter, that the works are "trivial and banal gimmicks" and that the fashion for conceptual art has gone too far.
Simon Wilson, curator of interpretation at the Tate, gave a guided tour to journalists yesterday to explain the exhibits.
He called them the best art produced by artists under 50 in Britain this year and he urged sceptics yesterday to give the objects as much attention as they might give to a television programme or a football match.
In 100 years, he added, the British conceptual art movement would be as recognisable as the Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century or the Renaissance style of the 16th century. "Somebody will see an object and say 'London, 1990s'."
