Rebels at the Becks

The coverage of this year's Beck's Futures has tended to focus on what is not on show - most notably Carey Young's 'Non-disclosure (Assisted Press Release)', but also the numerous performances and other works that exist outside the gallery. That aside, the exhibition nonetheless features plenty of what we've come to expect from a contemporary art exhibition.

You'll find vandalism and graffiti, TV monitors and a spot of bloody self-mutilation. It strikes poses against corporatism, the cult of celebrity and other targets readymade for T-shirt sloganeering, and the usual hotchpotch of 'isms' is spiced up by dollops of undiluted anthropology and sociology. And yet it fails to convince.

In the main space is a bitty, incoherent sprawl of hardware and soft furnishings, talking heads and bric-a-brac. The first exhibit is Francis Upritchard's 'Save Yourself', for which a portion of the ICA's floorboards have been torn up. Lying in the sawdust is a mummy (think Hammer Horror rather than pyramids) with a single, unseeing eye and a box of B&H (empty) tucked into its bandages. The mummy is surrounded by customised urns and, thanks to being plugged into the ceiling, emits a long, low, distinctly hungover-sounding moan. It probably has something to do with death, or perhaps the long white electrical cable is an umbilical cord (then again, perhaps it is just a long white electrical cable), but there is more comedy and pathos here than you'll find elsewhere in the show.

This is the fourth Beck's Futures prize, and as befits its toddler years, the gallery has been transformed into a series of 'activity corners' in which the viewer must look and read, listen, or read some more. It is rarely permissible to simply look (probably just as well, since there is precious little by way of visual stimulation) and the selected artists demand an obedient interaction of the viewer that is at odds with their own posturing anarchism. To watch Alan Currall's almost interesting 'Message To My Best Friend', a video of the artist delivering just that in tones of adenoidal, monotone sincerity (it resembles the unexpected TV hit, Marion And Geoff, but it is not as clever), we must sit down and put on headphones. Moving along to works by Inventory, a collective whose mantra is 'Extreme Sociology', we are invited to sit down at a table strewn with their pamphlets, before flopping into a sofa to watch Sleepwalkers, a film shot at an Americana festival.

Video is by far the most popular medium, and elsewhere David Sherry films himself seemingly sewing balsawood soles to his feet (ouch, yes, but also why?), while out in the corridor, Bernd Behr's video loops play on small and still smaller screens set into the wall, presenting sequences dull enough to have been snipped from the tape of a CCTV camera. In one, a man strolls across a drab street to clamber on top of a tall brick gatepost. Sometimes people pass by, but his slapstick antics go as unnoticed as David Sherry's crossdressing in 'An Advancement Into Retreat' or Carey Young's about-turns in a tide of suited city workers in 'Lines Made By Walking (After Richard Long)', her performance inspired by the work of the British 'land' artist.

Young credits her influence, but her work is no less derivative than any other piece in the show. The ICA's director has proudly dubbed this year's shortlist 'DIY art' or 'bedroom art', and the show is as inconsequential and tatty as those terms suggest, but for all its egalitarian lowtech, low-skill credentials, this is art about art, and as such it's as inaccessible and excluding as it comes. You have to work to untangle any meaning, and when that meaning so often boils down to a surly shrug or an ironic, slippery smile, you have to ask yourself if it's really worth the effort.