Pop go the artists

Beck's Futures, that quirky younger cousin of the Turner Prize, is three years old. The marriage between a brand of beer and Britain's hot new art prize is already so successful that when art students mention "the Beck's" it's the prize they're talking about and not the beer they are inevitably holding in their hand.

Cynics might argue that the sponsor gets too much consideration, and that the engagement of a pop star prize-giver - Björk this year - is all about being marketable and corporate-friendly. But pop is as important as beer to today's artists, and twice as intoxicating.

The Beck's project is masterminded by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. A list of the ICA's patrons gives a hint of a new (anti-) Establishment: from Madonna to Jarvis Cocker, via Pete Townshend, Peter Gabriel and Neil Tennant (in no particular order of age or street credibility). These aren't unknowing pawns, hired out by their record companies to add glamour, but performers with intense interest in the art. This is not pop art, but art with pop players.

On this year's panel of judges at Beck's Futures, alongside the usual respected curators and artists, sits Marianne Faithfull, one of the finest examples of the pop-and-art collision. Sure, she's an icon from the rock'n'roll Sixties, but look at her role in Sam Taylor-Wood's video installation Third Party (made in 1999 and on show at the Hayward's Sam Taylor-Wood exhibition, from 25 April). There Marianne sits, almost immobile, slowly drawing on a cigarette, while six other perspectives on a party scene are projected around the room. She looks as if she's seen it before. She has. Was Warhol's Factory like this the night after payday, I wonder?

Kylie Minogue has also starred in a Sam Taylor-Wood video. She has artists chasing after her to pay tribute. (When she was compiling her eponymous book a couple of years ago, it is rumoured that Jake and Dinos Chapman suggested that their contribution might consist of two pages stuck together with substances better left unmentioned.) Alex James, of Blur, was in Taylor-Wood's most recent show last year at White Cube 2 (when an invitation to the private view was harder to get than a backstage pass at a Madonna gig), while portraits of each member of the band by artist Julian Opie featured on a few million copies of their greatest-hits CD last year. Opie is another of the judges for this year's Beck's Futures.

So it goes on, looping like a needle in a dusty groove. "It's an untidy world," says Philip Dodd, director of the ICA, who nevertheless sees the constant inter-relating between pop and art as perfectly logical.

But it doesn't always work out for the best. Take David Bowie, for example. These days, cultural studies rather than art history dominate the art school - young artists have to learn to deconstruct all aspects of our culture, to understand everything they see and hear, not just the stuff of museums. To illustrate this erosion between high and low culture, I recently gave a lecture to a group of students titled "Why David Bowie doesn't make good records any more". A clumsy title, but an essential subject. One of my points was that art exists in a pop song as much as in a painting.

It broke my heart to talk about Bowie. It still does. He was my hero. He was the fearless innovator. Then he tried to get back to his art-school roots. He started out with a good line in Schiele pastiches, but then went all conceptual with computer images, wallpaper and shiny chromed face masks. Check it out on his website, bowieart.com. He even joined the board of Modern Painters magazine. The most innovative performer of the Seventies, and he wanted to be a significant artist. David, my love, my life - you already were.

But when Björk hands out the cheques to the Beck's winners next month, she'll be representing a generation that has gone beyond Bowie's confusions. She'll be standing there because of her refusal to discriminate between one genre and another, and her willingness to learn from, and encourage, collaborators. Many acknowledge film-maker Chris Cunningham's video work with her single, All is full of Love (1999), for example, as being more significant than the work he showed the following year in Apocalypse at the Royal Academy.

If Björk is lending glamour, she's lending it to a worthy cause. For the past decade or so Beck's has consistently supported contemporary shows in this country. The Futures exhibition, now at the ICA, gives the 10 short-listed artists four weeks to display their efforts before one of them is pronounced a winner on 7 May and handed a cheque for £24,000. The nine runners-up won't be crying into their beer. They get £4,000 apiece for being in the show. This is a big commitment from Beck's at a time when sponsorship for art is hard to come by.