It's art, Brian

BS It's Gilbert and George without the turds and dirty words.

NH That's absurd. Gillick believes that we are all conditioned by our visual environment and this ceiling proves it in the simplest, clearest terms. He has created an atmosphere that is momentarily thrilling but which quickly becomes dull and boring. If we stay here for five minutes we shall be profoundly bored.

At this point the Tate's Curatrix of Interpretation beards the two critics, directing their attention to a display case designed by Gillick, full of neat, clever little computer-generated commissions; she then embarked on a spirited but wearyingly long defence of Gillick's work, conjuring the ghost of Mondrian as the inspiration of his neomodernist design concepts for beach towels, Christmas cards and traffic islands. BS with mounting impatience snorts an F-word and cuts her short.

BS But it's only design, it's trivia, it has nothing to do with art - a beach towel, for God's sake! A beach towel for the Turner Prize! And none of it is cutting-edge in any conventional sense of that benighted idiom. Have you [addressing the curatrix] and Gillick never heard of Victor Pasmore, never heard of Peterlee? As for the architectural designs - give me an architect's drawings packed with information, not these slick hypotheses.

NH takes BS's elbow and hurries him into the Catherine Yass room to look at videos.

NH Yass is the bookies' favourite - God knows why.

BS (hanging head and looking away from the screen) Nor do I - and I want to be sick - this gives me nausea and vertigo.

NH But it's meant to make you queasy - the video camera is attached to a remote-control toy helicopter looping the loop over London.

BS walks off to contemplate three lightboxes illuminating what appear to be old-fashioned abstract paintings of the 1950s, but they are, in fact, blurred images of skyscrapers. NH joins him.

NH This, I agree, is pretty meagre stuff, banal too. But I dare say that will be your word for Fiona Banner.

BS Perhaps. The last thing I saw by her was a densely written and utterly tedious text about Lawrence of Arabia - not an educated hand, not a hand accustomed to a pen, not a hand capable of writing a decent letter, just graffiti, just the writing of a pre-pubescent child scribbling words on a wall - no image, no beauty, no taxing of the mind.

NH But that's not what she is interested in. Take this vast text piece occupying a whole wall, Arsewoman in Wonderland, in pinkish-red lettering on crumpled white plastic - it's a blow-by-blow description of what she sees in a pornographic video, no narrative, just the action noted in detail, each frame frozen so that she misses nothing, each sexual happening or nuance trapped in the language of the barrack room. At the very least she succeeds in expressing the tedium and banality of pornography. BS She is entitled to that tendentious and typically feminist view of a male pleasure, but as most men do not find pornography the least banal and boring, and Arsewoman in literary form is too tedious to contemplate, I doubt if it will have much success as a piece of social engineering. And it isn't art - it's nothing more than an old-fashioned attempt to outrage the sensibilities of Tunbridge Wells, to cock a snook at the yah-boo tabloid newspapers, and ensure notoriety. It is intended to provoke the angry baying of those whom the Tate can dismiss as Philistines and thus confirm its selfrighteousness.

NH I agree that Arsewoman as Banner relates it is virtually unreadable - it is much less coherent than Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, from which the plot is cribbed ...

BS You mean that the White Rabbit and Mad Hatter have a part in it?

NH I dare say, but I haven't seen it - and don't interrupt - and you're wrong in assuming that she's a feminist - she told me that she enjoyed the film.

BS I've had enough. This is the dullest Turner Prize show yet. No outrage unless you look really hard for it - just pretentious jabberwocky from both the artists and the Tate's interpreters. But I know who'll win.

NH Liam Gillick. Serota will give him the prize to prove that contemporary British art has grown up, no longer has to shock and can be severely intellectual. The flamboyant days of carcasses and rumpled beds are over. But, to be frank, I don't think any of them deserves to win.

BS You're right about Gillick and the betting man should back him. I can't see that he's severely intellectual - the stuff 's too trivial for that accolade - but he's dry, like an insect on a pin in a cork mat, and that's what will appeal to Serota. But if the other jurors are inclined to rebel, they might be inclined to back Tyson - at least there's a little rough-and-ready vigour in the smaller works.

NH Is this, as the bosses of Channel 4, the sponsors of the prize, opine, exciting work at the cutting edge, made by the brightest and best of their generation?

BS No.

NH Is it the most stimulating visual experience of the year?

BS No. No.

NH Does it nurture curiosity, excitement and intelligence?

BS No. No. No.

NH Is £3.50 well spent on seeing it?

BS No. No. No. No.

NH (wearily, and he's only 24) Eheu. Eheu. Verily these are the dying embers of a bankrupt civilisation.

Turner Prize exhibition is at Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1. Admission daily 10am-5pm. Tickets £3.50. Until 5 January. The winner will be announced on 8 December.