Thoroughly modern misses

likely epithets are ''ridiculous'' or ''boring''. And this for Britain's top prize? This as a response to the best modern art from 1999? This as a comment on the millennium?

Manifestly, something is wrong. The Turner Prize has long been problematic, but it's generally agreed 1999 is an all-time low. Its selection process remains a mystery, but how on earth, in a period of particularly vibrant British art noted for its staggering breadth, innovation, wit, and skill, could the Tate come up with four such lacklustre artists? No painters. No sculptors. No colour, No talent. Just video and film - predominantly monochrome in tone,

content, and presentation.

Three of this year's thirtysomething nominees are far from household names, yet with the Tate's well-oiled PR machine behind them, plus C4 coverage, each is a star overnight. There are other UK big money awards (the NatWest or Jerwood worth more than the Tate's #20,000), yet they fail to attract the media as they lack the imprimatur of the Tate's 100-year-old brand name.

So it's no surprise the Turner gets wall-to-wall coverage. The surprise is its product is so poor; its selection so restricted; its view limited to one particular aspect of art. It's as if the Tate has tunnel vision. As Britain's primary art advocate, it has a huge responsibility, yet one has to question if it honours its mission statement: ''to honour an outstanding British artist''.

The Turner may have begun as an honour, but soon turned into a PR exercise that's in danger of being counter-productive. For every art student it lures through the door, it turns off hundreds of thousands of the great British public who, quite rightly, can't see anything artistic in, for instance, Tracey Emin's soiled bed.

As for ''honouring an outstanding British artist'', who's heard of this year's winner? But they had heard of Tracey Emin.

Poor Tracey. A silly show-off screaming for attention, she gets drunk at the 1997 Turner Prize and makes a fool of herself on TV; then she's encouraged to make an exhibition of herself in the 1999 Turner exhibition proper - and doesn't win. Emin's subject is herself. A self-confessed Pysco Slut (her spelling); on video she pours out her soul, relentlessly spilling her innermost banal emotions. Her performance is self-indulgent but vulnerably endearing, her boozy persona fitting with the public stereotype of a sexually liberated, irresponsible Bohemian. However, the weak Turner display does her a disservice.

Emin can be an interesting artist. Her 1997 South London solo show was impressive for its sculptural birds, gonks, embroidered hangings and her now infamous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With Tent, lined with their names. The tent was fun, but the Tate

catalogue claims it as ''an icon of contemporary British art; her portable Sistine Chapel'' ceiling. Come on! While Emin is now a media celebrity, front page and famous for not getting the Turner prize, the winner is the second consecutive black artist to score. Could this be a purely politically correct decision? We'll never know. Certainly both 1998 winner Chris Ofili and 1999's Steve McQueen are quiet, personable professionals. Ofili's Turner win was relatively uncontroversial due to his decorative style. His recent New York debut in Sensation more than made up for it with Mayor Giuliani latching on to Ofili's innocuous Virgin to stir up a historic political storm.

But while Ofili's 1998 elegant glitter was a welcome respite from new technology, with McQueen, we are back on the well worn Turner track of relentless grainy video/film. McQueen's main contribution shows him standing stock still while a barn gable crashes down around him, the window hole neatly saving him. He admits it's a rerun of a 1928 Buster Keaton movie gag. His four-minute-plus silent video shows the event from every possible camera angle, but after the first few seconds, there's no surprise.

McQueen's other offerings include an old red and green tape playing repetitions of tap music for six minutes before disappearing - not before time - into the sky pulled by a balloon, plus two watery rings which transpire to

be semi-submerged bike wheels. These videos would never pass the 40-second sofa TV commercial test without one reaching for the fast forward, so why would we stand for hours in a gallery in silent admiration?

While McQueen relies on a 1920s gimmick, Steven Pippin resorts to the ancient camera obscura going to untold lengths to make his black and white photographs using 12 front-loading washing machines, trip wires and a train toilet to re-create sub-

Muybridge images (now 120 years old) of himself walking, running. Why such rudimentary home-made Emmett contraptions in the age of e-mail digital

cameras? Perversity? Folly? ''The art world is mostly a waste of time,'' he says. ''I need to start again.'' It seems Pippin himself has tired of this palaver and after 15 years, has given up photography for sculpture. Last, and to my mind the best of a bad bunch, are twins Jane and Louise Wilson. Born in 1967 in Newcastle, they took a conscious decision to attend different art schools, so while Jane stayed home, Louise ventured to Dundee. However, they were not to be parted. I well remember their famously identical 1989 degree shows, one in Dundee, one in Newcastle, featuring huge, intense photographs. They continue to focus on empty if theatrical interiors and atmospheric if anonymous rooms, ranging from bedsits to Berlin and the House of Lords.

Conscious of the powerful effect architecture can have on our psyche, they play with tunnels and doors,

corridors and tiles, to pack a social, political punch. Their Turner exhibits include perfect, metallic colour photographs of deserted tunnels lit by harsh

overhead neon plus a great new film titled Las Vegas, Graveyard Time, filmed in Caesar's Palace casinos and the city's underground Hoover Dam.

Two sets of double corner projections are placed opposite each other so that twin images run and join, tumble and separate like a giant fractured kaleidoscope slightly out of sinc. Clever,

disorientating stuff which ends

by highlighting today's decadent consumerism in contrast to

the great engineering achieve- ments of yore as epitomised by the Dam.

It will be a short dash over the Thames from Millbank's Tate to the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art

in the converted Bankside Power station, another monument to nineteenth-century design. The original Tate stays as a

centre for British art from 1500

to the present. Bankside, focusing on international twentieth-century art, opens in May. Last week I went to see how things looked before they start installing and hanging the Picassos and Warhols.

I can say, hand on heart, the new Tate Modern will be a

fabulous experience. The building alone is spectacular, its gigantic vastness breathtaking. Add in a magnificent location beside the Thames plus views over the river to St Paul's Cathedral, a terrace restaurant and seven floors of art, all orchestrated by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, and you have a certain winner.

This extremely ambitious #134m project, funded by lottery money plus private sponsorship, will provide a significant shift in world perception for London as a vital centre of artistic excellence.