With the demise of churchgoing and rave culture, the Turner Prize is one of the few collective experiences left in contemporary Britain. It’s a contemporary art version of Poppy Day (Remembrance Sunday), where the whole nation, or at least a relatively large proportion of it, unites and spares a few minutes to think about contemporary art. The newspapers devote columns and features like this one to it. Armies of school-children turn up to see the shortlist show. Everyone leaves a piece of their opinion on that neatly designed minimalist noticeboard that concludes the exhibition. The debate about whether contemporary art is crap is ritualistically and infuriatingly rehashed for the millionth time.

Admittedly, the prize got off to a wobbly start. Established in 1984, the first prizes went to already older-generation artists such as Malcolm Morley, Tony Cragg and Richard Long. But in the early 1990s Sir Nicholas Serota and Waldemar Janusczek, then arts commissioning editor at Channel 4, revamped the event by televising it and restricting prizes to artists under 50. The average age of Turner nominees dropped from 46 in 1985 to 30 at the time of its relaunch in 1991. At the same time, Tate attendance figures rose from 980,105 in 1985 to 1,816,421 in 1991. In the seven years since Tate Modern and Tate Britain opened the figures have trebled.