Life after Hoxton

I wager that the art landscape in London will look very different by the end of 2004. The gainsayers have been declaring the contemporary scene over since the Saturday night crowd started easing the art-hardcore out of their Hoxton haunts. But I've seen the future and its postcodes cover north, south, east and west.

The Camden Arts Centre reopens on 31 January after two years under wraps. The renovations have transformed the way the building works, giving more light and clarity to the spaces, without distorting the beautiful proportions. The three exhibition spaces offer a trio of solo shows for openers: Cerith Wyn Evans, who must be ripe for the Turner Prize short list this year, and two Americans, painter Christopher Wool and Rachel Harrison, one of my favourites of the new New York generation.

Camberwell's South London Gallery reopens in the summer, after nearly a year out of action. SLG went independent of Southwark Council last year, but money remains an issue. Little will appear to have changed, apart from better access to the space. SLG owns a derelict neighbouring building - perhaps in 2004 a benefactor will see the need to push ahead on the gallery's expansion programme.

The Whitechapel Gallery will begin its £10 million expansion into the former library next door, with the help of Ghent-based architects Robbrecht en Daem. We will not see the benefits for a couple of years, but under Iwona Blazwick's leadership, the Whitechapel has been reassessing its pivotal role in east London. There will be a revival of the Whitechapel Open for the first time since 1998 - the exhibition will be reinstated in June and promises to be a triennial event. The East End packs in more artists per square mile than anywhere in Europe; the show should reflect that concentration and be essential viewing.

Competition focuses attention. Beck's Futures has announced a provocative short list in anticipation of the Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition in March and the £65,000 prize share in April. Three of the past four winners were Glasgow-based artists; the new short list continues to illustrate that London is not the centre of the contemporary art universe, with contenders working in Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast. (This year we should resolve to get out of town more - to Liverpool for the Biennial in September, to Glasgow, to Manchester, to Gateshead.)

And what of the Turner Prize? It is still the highest-profile competition, but, after 20 years, surely there must be a rethink in 2004. Beck's sees to the younger, untested end of the art spectrum. The Turner, however, is caught between obligations to the new and something more lasting.

Paul Noble's exhibition of intricate drawing at the Whitechapel in September will come too late for this year's judges (on a technicality) but I would urge them to bend the rules. He fits the bill perfectly: superlative craft with a unique world view. He would get my vote. My prediction that Tim Noble and Sue Webster would make last year's short list unfortunately didn't come true. I would not wish to bring them bad luck by tipping them again, but a massive show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston must qualify the garbage rummagers for consideration.

Noble and Webster also feature in the Serpentine's State of Play exhibition next month, which will include the tragic-comic sketches of David Shrigley (another artist owed Turner attention); 2001 Turner winner, Martin Creed; and international ironists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Pipilotti Rist.

Sarah Lucas long ago turned down the offer of participating in the Tate's prize scrum, but she is the last of that generation not to make the Turner roll of honour. While we hold our breath to see if her bird-pooped car will adorn Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth (I wish it would), Lucas and her long-standing friends Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst feature in a major exhibition at Tate Britain in March. The title of this supergroup show, In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, comes from a flower-power Iron Butterfly song (say it fast enough and it sounds like In the Garden of Eden). Fairhurst keeps the lowest profile these days, but the grouping reunites the driving forces of YBA pre-history.

Tate Modern's programme is full of promise, too. Bruce Nauman's installation in the Turbine Hall will be unveiled in October, replacing the hugely popular mist and monofrequency light of Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project (a million trippers and counting). Nauman is arguably the most influential artist alive. You could not imagine, for example, Rachel Whiteread's work without Nauman's precedent from 1968, Space Under My Steel Chair, or Hirst's vitrines without Nauman's Double Steel Cage Piece of 1974, or Marc Quinn's blood-head, Self, without Nauman's cast body parts, or Matthew Barney's excesses without Nauman's performance videos.