Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812 J. M. W. Turner

There are certain questions that only the modern world could ask with a straight face. “Is the Turner Prize still relevant?” is one of them. It sits somewhere between “Does the U.N. have a handle on corruption?” and “Would you like to hear the extended remix of a Taylor Swift song?” The very asking feels less like curiosity than confession—an admission of cultural defeat by people dimly aware that something has gone wrong but unsure which end of the wreckage is art. Of course the Turner Prize is still “relevant”—in the sense that food poisoning is relevant, or that the Titanic’s deck chairs, once rearranged, were presumably relevant to someone. But relevant to the cause of art? To J. M. W. Turner? Ah, there’s the comic tragedy of the thing.

Turner, it is worth remembering, was an actual artist—one of those unnervingly competent figures of the Romantic age who could pick up a brush, glance at a tempest, and produce a seascape so luminous it seemed painted not with pigment but with light itself. He understood technique not as something you cited in a grant application, but as a skill acquired through the impertinent, unfundable ritual of work. Fishermen at Sea, Rain, Steam and Speed, The Fighting Temeraire: each a lesson in composition, atmosphere, and drama. Turner stood out because he did the one thing our cultural institutions have largely forgotten how to reward—he mastered his craft. He did not wind obsolete materials into anxious heaps and call it a “statement,” which is more or less how we arrive, two centuries on, at the Turner Prize’s 2025 winner, Nnena Kalu, whose vast tangles of taped, bundled, brightly colored debris resemble the contents of a recycling depot after a nervous breakdown. Turner, by contrast, commanded color the way a general commands battalions.

For decades now, the Turner Prize has functioned as Britain’s annual Advent calendar of cultural self-harm: Open the little door and discover another surprise assembled from resin, grievances, and whatever debris the artist happened to find beneath the cooker. The art critic Matthew Collings once described the prize as a formula—something initially startling that quickly reveals itself to contain a banal idea, “like the notions in advertising.” Collings was being charitable. Advertising, at least, is usually tethered, however loosely, to the hope of selling something other than itself.

But banality is still too generous a word for what the Turner Prize has become in its late-imperial phase: a ritual in which Britain’s cultural custodians assemble to reassure one another that the “new” is automatically profound, the “challenging” definitionally beyond challenge, and the “inclusive” morally superior to the merely beautiful. The decline was so slow, so solemnly applauded, that no one quite noticed when the shock-and-outrage years curdled into today’s quieter decadence—an indifference born not of acceptance but exhaustion. Once, the prize at least aspired to scandal; now it dispenses cultural vitamins and congratulates itself on the dosage.

Consider the canonical years of transgression. Damien Hirst achieved notoriety by suspending a fourteen-foot tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde—The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a title doing almost all the intellectual heavy lifting for what was, in practical terms, a dead fish in an expensive aquarium. Critics observed that anyone could have done it, to which Hirst replied with the immortal defense that would become the movement’s unofficial catechism: “But you didn’t, did you?” A crushing rejoinder, apparently, to the suggestion that concept had replaced craft, and that mere audacity now qualified as genius.

Tracey Emin followed with My Bed, an unmade mattress strewn with vodka bottles, stained sheets, and the detritus of a depressive, alcohol-soaked episode she assured us was both sexual and existential. Once again came the objection—surely anyone could display their own squalor and call it art?—and once again came the identical playground riposte: “Well, they didn’t, did they?” Emin had form. Before the bed there was Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of past lovers, converting confession into installation and autobiography into aesthetic achievement. That both artists instinctively reached for the same defense tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual rigor of the era: When challenged on substance, appeal to precedence; when accused of emptiness, point out that you arrived first.

And so to this year’s winner: Nnena Kalu, whose “cocoon-like sculptures” of VHS tape, plastic sheeting, cardboard tubes, and assorted found fabric have been hailed—by the sort of people who hand out press releases—as everything from “seismic” to “joyous uplift.” The Turner jury pronounced the moment “trailblazing,” a historic “toppling of the wall” between disabled and nondisabled artists, Kalu being autistic—a fact treated less as biography than as curatorial credential. This is noble enough, one supposes, if one assumes such a wall required demolition rather than being quietly reconstructed by institutions eager to display their own moral renovations. Turner once painted with light; Kalu winds with tape—and in 2025, that now suffices to claim Britain’s preeminent art award.

The Sunday Times’ Waldemar Januszczak, bless him, declared the sculptures “up there with the worst art” ever nominated for the prize—which is a high bar, or perhaps a deep pit, given the competition. Mohammed Sami’s war-haunted canvases were the bookmakers’ favorite, while Zadie Xa contributed bells—actual bells—dangling from a painting. One can only imagine Turner, squinting from the afterlife: Bells? On the canvas? Is this what they give prizes for now? Hand me my oils—I feel a migraine coming on.

But perhaps the real absurdity lies not with Kalu, who by all accounts works with diligence and intensity, but with the system that insists that this—this—is the natural heir to Turner. It is not Kalu’s sincerity that is in doubt; it is the prize’s. Tate Britain, custodian of Turner’s legacy and curator of his mausoleum, now insists that this is what art must look like, and that anything else—skill, beauty, technical command—is unfashionable, insufficiently critical, and therefore unworthy of the year’s large check. Once, the Turner Prize at least provoked argument. Now it provokes a shrug. Its power to scandalize has ebbed away, like public interest in the Labour Party conference. You can only poke the bourgeoisie in the eye so many times before they stop noticing.

The prize’s defenders, naturally, invoke its noble mission: to “reflect the Britain of today,” to question norms, to break boundaries. I am unconvinced—not for reactionary reasons, but for civilizational ones. Art, at least in any culture intending to outlast its funding cycle, is meant to elevate, to endure, and to speak across generations—not to flatter the vanity of critics or provide moral alibis for public subsidy. Put bluntly, I regard much modern art the way I regard much modern life: loud, unserious, and convinced of its own importance without having earned it. And the Turner Prize, like so much in modern Britain, has drifted so far from its origins that the simple act of rewarding technical mastery now feels almost subversive—a quiet heresy in a culture that prefers statements to skill and slogans to vision.

Turner once painted storms that threatened to swallow the world. Were he alive today, he might recognize that Britain is again caught in a squall—but this time it’s cultural. The Turner Prize stands as a beacon of that storm: a lighthouse flashing signals no sailor can read. And in that sense, perhaps, it remains perfectly relevant after all.