The Turner Prize is having an embarrassingly public midlife crisis ...Middle East

My heart sinks when a curator starts talking about how an artist’s work “explores the dynamics of race, gender, class and nationhood”. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a dinosaur – these things are important and sometimes interesting. As the building blocks of human character they are necessarily formative for an artist’s outlook and practice – of course they are, and that’s why it’s disappointing when an artist is defined in these terms.

Another reason – curators take note – is because when it happens, as it did today at Tate Britain during the unveiling of this year’s Turner Prize shortlist, it serves as a giant red flag that something worthy and therefore boring is imminent – a box-ticking exercise in progress. Surely no curator wants that, and artists deserve to be met with something more than weary cynicism.

Through their own self-destructive tendencies, the Turner Prize and its host institution the Tate, have become bywords for the slow and deliberate elimination of joy, risk and pizzazz from art, which in Tate hands must always “address” or to “speak to” something or other and shouldn’t ever be there for its own glorious but possibly frivolous sake. From the much-ridiculed trigger warnings in the galleries, to the hectoring tone of last year’s Turner Prize exhibition, Tate and with it the Turner Prize are desperate to show that every thought and action is beyond reproach.

Beyond reproach pretty well describes this year’s shortlist, immaculately balanced as it is across age, ethnicity, gender and cultural heritage, with Nnena Kalu and Zadie Xa’s textiles, Rene Matić’s old-hat installations exploring “the dynamics of race, gender, class and nationhood” (sorry Rene, you got stitched up good and proper in that presentation) and Mohammed Sami’s epic paintings, all sufficiently on-trend and socially and politically engaged enough to constitute an uncontroversial, conservative shortlist.

This won’t do at all: for one thing, such perfect balance on a shortlist invites suspicion that the nominees are fulfilling a quota, and no artist should have to be subjected to that sort of cynical, insulting scrutiny.

No less damaging is just how boring this shortlist is. It’s hard to imagine now, but at one point the Prize was actually televised, nominees like Tracey Emin, and winners like Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread, the topic of nationwide despair, rants, or amusement for a few days at least.

If you believe that art is for everyone – and Tate is at pains to say it does believe that – the nature of the conversation doesn’t matter: what’s important is that people, many of whom might never go inside an art gallery, were talking about the sinister pull of Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided, or the state of Tracey Emin’s sheets.

There’s little chance of any of that this year. Even the art critics can barely muster the energy to haul themselves along to the press briefing, and have to be lured there with the promise of coffee and pastries. The loss of confidence, the tiredness, the desperate need to prove itself relevant all look horribly like an embarrassingly public midlife crisis, but in truth, though the Turner Prize is barely in its forties, it’s been in trouble for years.

This year, the announcement came on the day of JMW Turner’s 250th birthday, offering at least the hope of something special being pulled out of the bag, something provocative, surprising, inventive, revelatory. For that, you’ll need to take yourself off to the new Turner room at Tate Britain, where a display of watercolours and drawings, including the oldest Turner in the collection, a landscape made when he was 12 years old, has just opened.

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