After the Turner Prize, What Happens Next?

The Turner Prize arrives in Middlesbrough this week, bringing work by Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau and Tanoa Sasraku to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). The public exhibition opens on 26 September and runs until 29 March 2027.

The setting is new, but the debate surrounding the prize is familiar. Since its launch in 1984, the Turner Prize has aimed not only to reward artistic achievement but to provoke ‘lively and intelligent debate’. At its height, it helped turn artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili into national talking points. Today, its influence appears less spectacular – but is it also less important?

That is what makes another exhibition, 250 miles south in London, worth watching. Freije and Sasraku, two of the four shortlisted artists, are also currently showing at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House on Dover Street as part of Like Music in the Blood, which runs from 3 September to 1 October.

When The Art Journal examined this year’s shortlist in April, Freije and Sasraku’s relatively undeveloped markets suggested the Turner Prize no longer functions as the commercial launchpad it once did.

Five months later, their simultaneous appearance at MIMA and Ropac offers a chance to ask if a nomination actually changes an artist’s trajectory, or whether commercial shows now have more influence.

Does it alter how museums, galleries and collectors respond to an artist – and, eventually, their market – or simply amplify attention that was already there?

Tanoa Sasraku portrait © Belinda Lawley, courtesy MiMA/The Turner Prize

The Prize as a Signal

A 2014 study by Pierre Pénet and Kangsan Lee, titled ‘Prize & Price: The Turner Prize as a Valuation Device in the Contemporary Art Market’, found that the Turner Prize helped produce what the researchers called ‘hastened success’, accelerating the careers and market recognition of young British artists.

In an interview, Dr Marina Gertsberg, senior lecturer in finance at the University of Melbourne, argues that the Turner Prize still gives buyers a reason to take an artist more seriously. “What a prize did historically, and still does, is lower the uncertainty buyers face about an artist,” she says.

“Art is a good whose quality is very hard to verify,” Gertsberg says. “Each work is unique, resales are rare and characteristics such as medium, size and subject explain only part of the price. Buyers rely on intermediaries and institutions to fill that gap.”

Gertsberg points to the high cost of those intermediaries. “Dealers typically take 30 percent to 70 percent of a sale, compared with around 7 percent for underwriting an equity offering,” she says.

In that context, she argues, a prize shortlist acts as a free credibility signal for collectors – “which is why I would expect it to still matter.”

Sasraku offers a live test of that argument. Her work in Like Music in the Blood sits within an exhibition in which eight artists use painting and sculpture to approach the body through omission, displacement, projection and abstraction.

At the same time, Sasraku is presenting Tropical Ken, her third solo exhibition with Vardaxoglou, at the gallery’s 7 Royalty Mews space in Soho. Running from 11 September to 31 October, the exhibition brings together new sculptures exploring tropical leisure, militarism and colonial memory. 

Disassembled combat clothing is translated into layered newsprint forms, with camouflage patterns exposed onto the paper using a domestic tanning bed before the works are soaked, swollen and assembled with binder clips.

The two London exhibitions show the overlap at the heart of this question: institutional endorsement arriving alongside increased commercial exposure.

Simeon Barclay, The Ruin, Turner Prize 2026. Installation view at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Art. 

Recognition Versus Demand

For artists at this stage, whose markets are still largely built through gallery sales rather than auction results, growth is often visible first in new collectors, museum relationships and continued gallery backing.

Marine Tanguy, CEO of MTArt Agency, distinguishes between “a collector, whose approach is deeply rooted in art history and the art world, and an art buyer who is driven more by personal connection and the story behind the work”. She argues that this distinction helps explain why “awards remain important within the art world, but they're no longer the only, or even the main, route to building a market for an artist”.

Magnus Resch, who researches the art market, points to Artgraph.ai's Whitney Biennial Report 2024, which found that ‘both Biennials showcase over 75 percent of artists from the Medium to Blue Chip sectors, i.e. artists with a strong art market presence’.

Using categories that distinguish artists according to their existing market presence, the report found that established artists in the Medium, High and Blue Chip groups experienced relatively minor changes following the 2022 Biennial, while emerging artists in the Low and Zero categories experienced significant increases in market exposure after participation.

The Whitney is not the Turner Prize, but both place artists inside a high-profile selection process that can draw the attention of museums, collectors and galleries. The pattern is suggestive: this kind of endorsement appears to matter most for artists who have not yet established a mature market.

That attention does not reach all artists equally. In her co-authored 2017 paper, ‘Glass Ceilings in the Art Market’, Dr Gertsberg found that women remain excluded from the very top 0.03 percent of the auction market, where 41 percent of revenues are concentrated. The finding suggests that inequality can deepen rather than disappear as artists move from the primary to the secondary market. Many of these broader structural issues are explored further in AWITA and Artnet’s Hardwiring Change series, which examines gender and racial bias, midcareer attrition, administrative overload, pay inequity and barriers to career progression across the arts sector.

For Sasraku, Vardaxoglou says the nomination has already created opportunities beyond immediate sales. "It is a fantastic achievement and very well deserved for Tanoa, who has consistently made important work since graduating from Goldsmiths in 2018,” he says. “Tanoa's Turner Prize nomination follows a series of significant institutional exhibitions, and gives a wider audience the opportunity to engage with her work. Major institutional recognition of this kind also allows us to build on Tanoa’s strong collector base by making new connections with public institutions and private collections globally."

Marguerite Humeau, Torches, Turner Prize 2026. Installation View at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Art. Photo David Levene

What Lasts After the Attention

For Resch, what happens after the nomination matters more than the nomination itself. “Today, the network around an artist matters much more than any individual prize: which galleries represent them, which museums exhibit them, and whether those institutions continue to support them over time,” Resch says. “A prize can create attention, but it rarely creates a sustainable market on its own.”

Hirst offers a useful comparison. In 1995, he famously spent his £20,000 Turner Prize winnings at Soho's Groucho Club. It was an era when the prize could turn artists into household names; today, its influence operates within a much smaller professional audience.

London art critic Tabish Khan notes the fading cultural relevance of the Turner Prize: “The Turner Prize had its heyday in the late 90s and early 2000s when contemporary art in the UK was at its height, with the YBAs creating waves and the opening of Tate Modern,” he says. “Ever since, the Turner Prize has been struggling for relevance.”

One way to re-establish its credibility, he suggests, is to challenge its establishment trappings. “This year, the Turner Prize is in Middlesbrough, wouldn't it be great if the people of Middlesbrough decided the winner rather than an often elitist judging panel?”

But that decline in public attention may matter less to the collectors, galleries and museums who can still shape what happens next. As Dr Gertsberg observes, “the mechanism [of the Turner Prize] is intact, but potentially the audience it affects has narrowed or changed.” She continues: “A shortlist still gets an artist in front of the people who make purchasing decisions. How galleries and repeat buyers respond afterwards decides whether that visibility turns into a career.”

The Turner Prize may not push an artist’s prices up, but it can change how seriously they are taken. Its power may lie less in making an artist more expensive than in making them harder to ignore.

Like Music in the Blood shows what that looks like now. A shortlist brings attention, but what follows depends on whether galleries, institutions and collectors continue to back the artist once the prize moves on.