Does the Turner Prize Still Move the Market?

It’s 25 years since Madonna handed Martin Creed the Turner Prize for his iconoclastic Work No. 227: The Lights Going on and Off with the words, ‘Right on motherfuckers, everyone is a winner!’ And it’s seven years since the shortlisted artists for the 2019 edition delivered on that promise by agreeing to share the award in a collective act of solidarity. This year’s shortlist, announced on 23 April, has a different feel: less political, less bombastic, less hype.

The list of four names contains no art stars. London-based Frenchwoman Marguerite Humeau is the best known with a CV that includes exhibitions at Tate Britain, the Palais de Tokyo and the Venice Biennale, and the only one who is supported by a bluechip gallery, White Cube. The others – fellow Londoner, Kira Freije, Yorkshire-based artist Simeon Barclay, and Tanoa Sasraku, who was born in Plymouth and now lives and works in Glasgow – are emerging names in terms of market profile. 

Barclay is nominated for The Ruin, an hour-long spoken word performance that folds autobiography into a wider meditation on Britishness, class and masculinity. Performed with live percussion and horn, and staged at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Arts and The Hepworth Wakefield, the work takes the Leeds artist into new territory, away from objects towards the linguistic, sonic and psychological. It resists easy documentation, let alone ownership, existing primarily in the moment of its delivery and in the spaces that host it.

Marguerite Humeau, Torches, 2025 (installation view, ARKEN Museum) Photo: Mathilde Agius © Marguerite Humeau. Courtesy of the artist.

Freije’s nomination is for her first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK, Unspeak the Chorus, also at the Hepworth (where it continues until 4 May). Here, 20 life-size pieces made from steel and cast aluminium are arranged in small groups, suggesting a narrative that, while unknowable, remains emotionally charged. The humanlike sculptures are created using casts of the artist’s hands and feet while faces are based on friends and acquaintances. Although they are enacted as site-specific installations, her works are also available as independent pieces – it's easy to see how Freije might benefit commercially from the spotlight of such a prestigious prize.

Humeau’s Torches, shown at museums in Copenhagen and Helsinki, operates at a different scale, both conceptually and physically. Her installations draw on evolutionary biology, archaeology and speculative fiction, combining organic and synthetic forms within choreographed environments of light and sound. Yet despite infiltrating the international contemporary art circuit, her monumental practice exceeds straightforward commodification, dependent on institutions capable of realising it.

Sasraku’s Morale Patch, presented at the ICA, brings geopolitical language into the gallery through a cool, controlled installation of sculptural objects and works on paper. Referencing the infrastructures of oil and military power, the work is deliberately restrained, adopting a stripped-back, almost clinical display in which meaning accumulates incrementally rather than through overt declaration. 

Roberts Institute of Arts presents Simeon Barclay, The Ruin, January 2025 (installation view, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London). Photo: Anne Tetzlaff © Anne Tetzlaff and the artist. Courtesy of the artist & Workplace. 

When the Turner Prize was established in 1984, its ambition was straightforward: to award the artist who had made ‘the greatest contribution to art in Britain in the past 12 months’. More telling was its secondary aim, to stimulate ‘lively and intelligent debate’. A decade later, broadcast by Channel 4, amplified by the print media’s newfound interest in contemporary art, and fuelled by the rise of the YBAs and Cool Britannia, the Turner Prize turned into a spectacle of its own making. It delivered on ‘lively’ almost to the point of self-parody. Only in recent years has it attempted to foster a more nuanced dialogue about British art: about who defines value, about who gets to take part, and who it serves.

At the height of its public consciousness, peak Turner Prize gave us Damien Hirst’s deathly vitrines, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Chris Ofili’s dung paintings. It became shorthand for a broader culture war about taste, modernity and money. The prize didn’t just stimulate debate; it manufactured it, packaging contemporary art as a series of digestible provocations. It became a national event, a TV show akin to the Eurovision Song Contest: part celebration, part collective scratching of the head – ‘Is this art?’

It also helped make many of its winners and nominees very rich, very quickly, constructing market value through the instant recognition of apparent greatness. Whereas, previously, an artist’s reputation had been built gradually through critics, curators, galleries and collectors, the Turner Prize disrupted this model, compressing that process, bringing together different gatekeepers and collapsing their separate judgments into one moment. It didn’t just capture the rise of British art, it accelerated it, compressing years of critical, institutional and market validation into a single, highly visible event, enabling artists in the 1990s to achieve rapid market success at unusually young ages.

The scale of that acceleration is measurable. A 2014 study by Pierre Pénet and Kangsan Lee, analysing the Turner Prize as a ‘valuation device’ within the art market, found that the prize fundamentally altered the tempo of artistic success. The average age of nominees dropped from 44 in 1984 to just 29 by the early 1990s, while British artists began achieving major auction results decades earlier than their predecessors. Where figures such as Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso were still selling works for a few hundred dollars in their thirties, artists like Damien Hirst and Chris Ofili were reaching seven-figure prices before the age of 40.

Tanoa Sasraku, Morale Patch, 2025-26 (installation view, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London). Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards © Jack Elliot Edwards and the artist. Courtesy the artist and Vardaxoglou Gallery, London 

By the early 2000s, the Turner Prize had lost its monopoly on attention. As similar awards proliferated and the art world expanded globally, its ability to mint stars diminished even as it became more firmly embedded within institutional culture. What remained was authority without spectacle: a prize that still mattered but no longer shocked. While the prize has often stood for something that it could never really deliver on – a barometer for society, or the state of contemporary art – is the prize finally maturing to become what it first set out to be?

Part of that shift is geographic. Since leaving London on a regular basis, the Turner Prize has shed some of the conditions that once fuelled its hype. Outside the capital’s media and market circuits, there is less pressure to produce instant spectacle and more room for slower, more introspective forms of practice. The result is a prize that feels less like a barometer of London’s art world and more like a reflection of a broader and less centralised cultural landscape.

This year’s shortlist, shaped by institutions such as The Hepworth Wakefield and culminating in Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art at Teesside University, where the winner will be announced on 10 December, feels like the clearest expression of that shift yet. The Turner Prize once helped create the market. This year, it seems less concerned with it.