The Turner prize is boring

Inside Tate Britain on Monday night, a fashionable London audience will applaud the award of the £25,000 Turner prize to whatever is judged the best thing a British artist under the age of 50 can come up with.

Standing outside will be a group of Stuckists protesting against the overlord who for nearly a quarter of a century has ruled this process. Sir Nicholas Serota chaired the prize until 2007, yet still retains his grip. It is he who has made figures such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin so famous and rich. Yet this year, for the first time, there are finally signs that the Serotan winter is beginning to thaw.

The protestors rage against an art establishment that long ago embraced conceptual art as a dogma, taught that skill is a dirty word, turned art history into a vehicle for cultural Marxism and the rubbishing of genius, indoctrinated generations of art students with the belief that if you say it’s art then it’s art and that success is impossible without fluency in the language of conceptual art-speak. They shout about the nakedness of the emperors and allege plagiarism, nepotism and other misdeeds among the magic circle.

Yet till now public figures mostly toed the Serota line. Only a few — Robert Hughes, Brian Sewell — never ceased to mock and deride where deserved. The Jackdaw, a magazine offering a forum for independent views on the visual arts, has been brave and resolute in its defiance. But on the whole, the young and ambitious recognised that such heresy was no way to get a good degree, or become an artist, art critic, curator, gallerist or academic. The message was clear: conform, or die the professional death.

This started in 1974 when Michael Craig-Martin, a minimalist conceptualist, exhibited a glass of water standing on a wall-mounted shelf, called it ‘An Oak Tree’, and explained in the accompanying text that he had changed the physical substance (though not the appearance) of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.