Art
Anyone floundering for a clue as to what the Turner prize is about should make straight for Disappearance at Sea by Tacita Dean, one of the four short-listed entrants in the Tate Gallery's competition show. There are various reasons for homing in on Dean's work, among them that it is the most painterly of this year's entries: something of an irony, given that it is actually a 16mm film. Her subject - inspired by the loss at sea of the yachtsman Donald Crowhurst - is probably the only one of the four that Turner would have recognised as being the sort of thing suitable for putting on canvas. That is not the prime reason for elbowing your way past Cathy de Monchaux's suede genitals, Sam Taylor-Wood's angst-ridden dinkies or Chris Ofili's Spandexed gangsta rappers to get to Disappearance at Sea, however. The point about Dean's oddly troubling film is that it is about lenses.
This can be said with some certainty because the artist is there, on video, to tell us so. Three lenses star in Disappearance at Sea: first, the revolving lens of the St Abb's Head lighthouse, its remorseless turnings hypnotically flattened by Dean's filming; then the optic through which the lighthouse is filmed, an anamorphic lens important enough to warrant its own credit in the show's accompanying catalogue. Perhaps the most significant lens in Dean's work, though, belongs to Channel 4, which will hand the artist a cheque for £20,000 (and film itself doing so) in the sadly unlikely event that she should win.
Describing the annual Turner prize junketings as a media event sounds like a truism, but Dean's game of mirrors suggests that it is true in another sense. One way or another, all four competing sets of work are shaped by their status as media products. Dean's second entry - Roaring Forties, a series of seven chalk drawings - is laid out like a film storyboard, the narratives of its various parts linked by instructions such as "pan into . . .".
As well as using media-ish media, Taylor-Wood's photographic and video installations star media-esque people. (Her claustrophobic film, Atlantic, takes its name from the Soho bar where it was shot. There are probably some Channel 4 staff in it, if you look hard enough.) Ofili may complain about the press notoriety achieved by one of his chosen media - elephant dung - but a little infamy has never hurt a Turner contestant's chances. De Monchaux makes her bid for televisual eye-widening by concentrating on that old standby of the British press, sex.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of this. Art has always responded to the preoccupations of the society in which it was made. The economic interests of early 19th-century Britain were maritime; Turner painted seascapes. Ours is a media society. The Lorenzo de' Medici of our day is an adman, Charles Saatchi. Talk to students at any of the more savvy British art schools (notably the all-triumphant Goldsmiths) and they will freely admit to making Saatchi art in the hope of it being assumed corporeally into the artistic Valhalla on Boundary Road.
The main aesthetic consideration of Saatchi art, like that of advertising billboards, is that it should be eye-catching: hence the title, "Sensation", of last year's Royal Academy show. Under the distant but austere eye of the Tate's Nicholas Serota, the defining aesthetic of Turner prize art has come to be that it should flatter - perhaps even to resemble - a rather more refined media master: television, which sponsors the prize. The only problem with all this is that the Turner prize is not actually about seeking out the best in new British art, nor even the best in new, young British art. It is about finding the best in new, young British art that will look good on (or even look like) television. Like Dean's anamorphic lens, it provides a distorted view of the world.
"Turner Prize 1998" continues at the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London SW1 (0171-887 7000) until 10 January
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