Tonight, after weeks of speculation, the name of the winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced. Will it be Shirazeh Houshiary, Willie Doherty, Antony Gormley or Peter Doig? Or could it be, as Andrew Graham-Dixon believes, the year of the dark horse? The year the prize goes to the real star of the show: the Turner Prize itself?
The declared purpose of the Turner Prize has changed, shiftily, every year since the award was invented. Originally conceived in 1983 to reward ''an outstanding contribution to British art'', following numerous puzzling metamorphoses it now merely exists - according to Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery and chairman of its panel of judges - ''to bring new developments in the visual arts to the attention of that wide public which is interested in the culture of our own time''.
This inoffensive, well-meaning update, this revision of a revision of a revision of the Tate's view of the function of the Turner Prize is not, however, shared by everyone - not even everyone associated with the Prize itself. For instance, Waldemar Janusczak, commissioning editor for Arts at Channel 4, which both sponsors the prize and broadcasts the awarding of it, regards its function as more purely symbolical. He believes - to judge by his essay in the short and glossy pamphlet published to mark the announcement of the 1994 shortlist - that it signals ''the awakening in Britain of a new climate of optimism, a renewed faith in change''. The Turner Prize, Janusczak says, is part of a millennial trend running through the entire culture. For those who may be unaware of such a trend, he is referring to that new spirit of fervent radicalism and open-mindedness at work in Britain today, the other great modern symbol of...
