For its 40th anniversary, the Turner prize returns to Tate Britain after national outings to museums from Liverpool and Coventry to Eastbourne and Hull. For the next five months, the upper galleries at Millbank will be entirely devoted to the 2024 shortlist. And if, as the old saying goes, we get the Turner prize we deserve, then our aesthetic times are apparently not worth the ticket (£14 for non-members), being the most insipid, issue-based, dutiful and conventional trudge of a show in years.
It doesn’t look like this on paper. The quartet of artists is properly international: Filipino, Roma, Black British, Scottish Sikh. They range in age from 38 to 65, and work in everything from drawing and painting to textile, installation, sculpture and soundscape. There is a three-metre long reprise of an Imelda Marcos bracelet, a film of footsteps projected on spectral organdie on the floor, a suite of larger-than-life oil portraits recently shown at the Courtauld. There are so many exhibits, in fact, that the titles run like dense stock inventories along the walls; so much stuff and yet so little to look at.
