REALITY ART SHOW.

Phil Collins, a video artist, was at a pay phone in the subway in Brooklyn when he found out that he'd been nominated for the Turner Prize, the world's best-known contemporary-art competition. "I was incredibly startled," Collins said. "The prize might be a stage for mockery--I might make a fool of myself on a grand scale. I imagined a scene out of a Brian De Palma movie. I felt like Carrie, covered in pig's blood." Collins was taking a cigarette break on the massive neoclassical steps of Tate Britain, the original Tate museum, in London, which sits upriver from its sexier, younger sibling, Tate Modern. An enormous statue of Britannia, helmet on her head, trident in her fist, glowered down from the roof. Collins, who is thirty-six, has an asymmetrical haircut and wears carefully culled thrift-shop clothes. "It took me a week to accept the nomination," he said. "I had to think hard about the joys and threats of exposure."

The Tate inaugurated the Turner Prize in 1984, and its history is, in part, a tale of newspaper headlines. In 1995, Damien Hirst made news on several continents when he won the prize after a show featuring a work in which a cow and its calf were bisected and displayed in four tanks of formaldehyde. In 1999, Tracey Emin received so much attention for her entry--an installation that included her own unmade bed, littered with blood-stained underwear, condoms, and empty liquor bottles--that many people believe she won the prize, even though she was only a finalist. And in 2003 Grayson Perry, whose principal medium is ceramics, and who likes to wear dresses befitting a Victorian six-year-old, accepted his award by saying, "It's about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize!"

For the past several years, sales of contemporary art have been setting records all over the world. When the focus on the present is such that no one waits for history to make decisions about what is great, good, or simply competent, marks of validation like the Turner Prize become more important. Unlike other art prizes, such as the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize and the Whitney's Bucksbaum Award, which are just a line on an artist's C.V., the Turner Prize is a cross between the Academy Awards and "American Idol"; people take sides, argue about the contest at dinner parties, and even place bets on who's going to win. Every May, four artists are short-listed by a jury of four judges selected by Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director. The artists must be younger than fifty, based in Britain, and have attracted the jury's attention with an outstanding show sometime during the previous year. In October, each of the four nominees opens an exhibition in one of the grand rooms at Tate Britain. Eight weeks later, the jury reconvenes and chooses a winner. That evening, at a glamorous awards ceremony broadcast on television, the winner is presented with a check for twenty-five thousand pounds by a celebrity host (hosts have included Brian Eno, Charles Saatchi, Zaha Hadid, and Madonna, who distinguished herself by saying "motherfuckers" on live TV).

The nominees for the most recent Turner Prize could hardly have been more different from one another. In addition to Phil Collins, the video artist, there was Rebecca Warren, a sculptor; Tomma Abts, an abstract painter; and Mark Titchner, who works in several mediums.

One morning in October, several dozen journalists and photographers showed up for a press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition. Rebecca Warren's room contained three types of sculpture: gestural figures made of bronze, unfired clay forms, and vitrines that held bits of detritus, including a cherry pit and a used cotton ball. The bronzes were like Giacometti sculptures that had been given a good meal. The clay pieces had a look that was more preschool than art school.

A petite curator in low-rise black jeans briefed the journalists on Warren's work. "These female approximations embody unleashed and exuberant creativity," she said, adding that Warren's influences included R. Crumb, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. The press people weren't buying it. "Unfired clay?" one murmured. "Is that half baked or entirely unbaked?" The photographers ...