Art - Stop moaning, says Ned Denny, and take notice of work that transforms the ordinary

The annual stink over the unveiling of the Turner Prize shortlist - everything from the well-rehearsed sighs of waged critics to the raised eyebrows of Michael Buerk as he introduces it as the final, "comedy" item on News at Ten - can fill you with an equally perverse determination to enjoy the show. Because all this isn't really a debate about "good" and "bad" art, you tell yourself, but a deep-rooted animosity towards artists and the peculiarly simple things they do - something that, as Howard Nemerov's mock- biblical 1958 poem about people laughing at Barnett Newman's pictures reminds us, has long been there: "And when Elijah on Mount Carmel brought the rain,/Where the prophets of Baal could not bring rain,/Some of the people said that the rituals of the prophets of Baal/Were aesthetically significant, while Elijah's were very plain." So you turn up hoping, if not for miracles, maybe for a little cool refreshment, something less aggressively stupid than the outside world.

The piece that has received the lion's share of press attention this year, Martin Creed's self-explanatory Work No 227: the lights going on and off (2000), irradiates the large central gallery with a distinctly unprovocative flicker. Much has been made of the work's extreme minimalism - although, in comparison with the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti's 1966 sculpture Yearly Lamp (a large light bulb that, it was claimed, would illuminate briefly just once every 12 months), it's positively prodigal in its dispensation of light. The pale strip lights and their surrounding halogen lamps power relentlessly on and off, though it's not so much a case of extremes of light and dark ("the gallery will be filled with light and then thrown into darkness", the press release declares optimistically) as the cold glow of fluorescent tubes versus the gloom of a winter's day. It's an extreme form of "making do", elegant and kind of boring at the same time. Maybe that is what all the fuss has been about - in a culture where what you are is defined above all by what you have, coming empty-handed breaks a fundamental taboo, and exposes, too, our need to be entertained.

Mike Nelson's intricately constructed The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent (2001) goes the other way. Whereas Creed strips the gallery down to nothing and hints that we might find some pleasure in that bare place, Nelson has built a claustrophobic maze of rooms and corridors for people to get lost in. As some of his detractors have pointed out, the immediate effect is to make you feel like you've blundered into the Tate's storerooms, pierced the cleanliness of the public spaces and ended up tiptoeing guiltily behind the scenes. But it's seedier than that, and the scents of linoleum and dusty Bakelite are so powerfully redolent of some long-disused offices in 1970s Walthamstow that I'm not convinced anyone will think to construct "narratives" from the vaguely suggestive objects (bits of coral, maps, clown masks) that Nelson has left lying around. Which is not to say that you cannot derive a similar enjoyment from this faux non-place as you would from an actual one; it's like a repository of dead things, melancholy because disregarded and starved of light.

From two installations - one that works by taking things away, the other by enclosure and accumulation - to two artists working with video (there are no painters on this year's shortlist). Isaac Julien's Vagabondia (2000) bears comparison with The Cosmic Legend in that it depicts its location, Sir John Soane's Museum in London, as a kind of afterlife (the Creole-speaking narrator at one point says something like "after death, the living can continue to learn"). Unlike Nelson's decayed limbo, however, Julien's split-screen work turns the museum into an elegant hall of mirrors. The film's most voluptuous moment occurs when the camera closes in on the rich crimson velvet of a gown, momentarily fusing the red glow of the auditorium and the on-screen image into an all-enveloping, blood-coloured womb.

The slick, cinematic sensuality of Julien's work contrasts strongly, in turn, with the grittier beauty of Richard Billingham's. Billingham came into Sunday-magazine prominence with Ray's a Laugh (1996), a book of captionless photographs (originally intended as studies for paintings) of his parents and younger brother in their West Midlands council flat. Ray in Bed (1999), one of two video pieces on display, returns us to familiar territory: his father supine in bed; his mother making intermittent attempts to rouse him; Billingham the invisible witness of their daily routine. His camera focuses on detail after detail - the patterns of wallpaper and duvet, a sunlit patch of wool, Ray's wrinkled neck - but this is the acute sensitivity of the convalescent rather than that of the connoisseur. Muffled music drifts in from the adjacent film, Tony Smoking Backwards (1998), in which a huge close-up of his brother's face is seen to suck in smoke like ectoplasm. Both pieces achieve, albeit in a modest and highly undemonstrative way, that transformation of the ordinary that characterises aesthetic experience. A pity everyone's too busy moaning to notice.

"Turner Prize 2001" is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (020 7887 8000), until 20 January 2002

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