Race for Turner Prize

Usually, the only thing an art critic can enjoy about the Turner Prize is the chance to pretend he’s a racing pundit for a day. Most of the time it’s so obvious who’s going to win that one can sound prophetic quite easily (unlike with Damien Hirst auctions). Only someone who bets on horses would not have seen that Tomma Abts would land the prize last year. But this time it’s going to be a much closer-run race.

Cathy Wilkes is probably bringing up the rear here. Her work could be retitled "Something funny happened at the check-out counter today". In an extremely neatly laid-out installation, female shop dummies lounge naked next to two supermarket check-out counters. On the head of one is a birdcage. The other wears a nurse’s cap and has horse-shoes, tea-cups and a shell suspended from her neck.

The conveyor belts have stopped; on them are open jars containing remnants of food, as if the shopping had been consumed there and then. There’s a pink foam mat on the floor with the shape of a heart on it, which looks like it’s been nibbled at by the snails which cover it. This is great surrealism for contemporary Britain but it’s weighed down by a lumbering feminist message.

Incidentally, if you want to enjoy these works, avoid reading the texts on the gallery wall, which are the worst I have ever read. "Wilkes’ installations," one learns, "apprehend an end point in our understanding of things as they are." What meaningless pretension. If I ruled the world, people who wrote lines like that would have their hands cut off.

Coming up on the outside is Mark Leckey, the trendiest artist in Britain today. Posters on the wall of his installation imitate the style of rock album covers, reading "Mark Leckey Resident". His film of Jeff Koons’s stainless steel Rabbit sculpture in his flat (Made in ‘Eaven, 2004) is a hilarious, self-ironising work about adulation.

Having presumably spent a long time persuading the owner to lend him the multi-million dollar work, Leckey lovingly films the reflections of his spartan Soho living room in the mirrored surfaces of the work.

Runa Islam’s films are elegant but not all of equal originality. "Cinematography" is a masterful abstraction of one of the great art forms of the 20th century. Islam’s motion control camera has been programmed to spell out the word "cinematography" as it moves across a film studio crammed with all kinds of technical equipment. It’s cunningly minimalist, highly evocative and completely original, which is the equivalent of Jasper John’s paintings of letters.

The camera is deprived of its usual representational purpose, of executing a shot in a narrative, and comes instead to present the act of filming itself, just like John’s alphabet pictures drew attention to the textures and colours of his painting. This is pure filming, like an abstract artist might make a work of pure colour. Islam could win for this film alone — but another one, of a woman breaking porcelain crockery, lapses into clichés of feminist history, bourgeois symbols and slow motion effects.

If you want my tip, put £20 on Goshka Macuga, one of a number of artists today who have moved beyond the ready-made to the remade. She plucks overlooked moments from history out of obscurity, like a charity worker running a home for the dispossessed. Here she’s picked up the underrated activities of the wives of two famously creative men, architect Mies Van de Rohe and British modernist painter Paul Nash.

Collages using materials from the Tate’s archive of Nash and his wife, Eileen Agar, draw attention to Agar’s artistic sensibilities. Rohe’s wife, Lily Reich, was an exhibition designer and Macuga has meticulously remade some of the textile display stands she designed for an expo in Barcelona in 1929.