Taking part in the Turner Prize is a bit like finding yourself at the centre of some public scandal. At first you just sit there while all and sundry pass judgment. But then slowly time passes. The offence gets forgotten. All people remember is that you were once rather famous. The recognition factor is stronger than the sense of outrage.

For years the Turner has held its own as the most talked-about fixture in the art-world calendar. Since it was established (by the Tate Galley’s Patrons of New Art) with the aim of promoting contemporary British talent by bringing to the fore younger artists who were working in radical new ways, it has been the target of those who preferred tradition. Courting publicity, it stirred up argument.

You will no doubt have heard all the old quibbles and taunts: it’s a stitch up. (It doesn’t pretend to offer a representative survey.) It’s an insider job. (A cabal of dealers seems to provide the contenders.) What’s happened to painting? (In almost a quarter of the shortlists it gets forgotten.) Where are the women? (Only three females have won to date.) Call that art? (Anything from traffic cones to rice grains have featured.) My five-year-old daughter could do better. (If you are very lucky, one day she will.)

This year the annual Turner exhibition decamps to Tate Liverpool (opening Oct 19). Tate Britain, bereft of this important autumnal boost to its visitor numbers, is staging a retrospective that runs through the work of past prizewinners instead.

The award that was traditionally associated with all that is rebellious, radical and cutting-edge came of age a couple of years ago when it marked its 21st birthday. Now, with Turner Prize: A Retrospective, it begins to look positively matronly. You wander about amid familiar pieces. At their most interesting they seem to have grown up rather gracefully. At their dullest they have dropped off the cultural map. And it’s terribly hard to remember what once caused the controversy, what exactly it was that we all got so worked up about. The Turner’s past winners are paraded through the Tate’s galleries as tamely as the Hamiltons on some TV game show.

This show proves a fairly useful if very selective history of artistic fashions for the past 23 years. As you drift down the years, through the spaciously laid-out galleries in which each of the artists is allocated a fairly equal space, you can watch the changes taking place. You can see the cultural dominance of a New York art scene being rejected in favour of our home-grown “New British Sculpture”. You can watch painting being abandoned at some imagined impasse.

You can witness the rise of the conceptual, watch strict formal debates giving way to incontinent confessions, see old-fashioned draughtsmanship being ditched for the video camera. You witness the artwork as display object being replaced by the project or performance that takes place somewhere in the community outside the museum walls.

Of course, most of these shifts will prove at best footnotes in the broad sweep of history. When compared with the ground-shifting innovations of the Italian Renaissance or the world-fracturing experiments of European Modernism, these homespun fiddlings are what the garden-shed rocket is to the Nasa space programme. But then, garden-shed innovations can grow into major perceptual shifts. Perhaps that is why sheds seem so important to Turner Prize contenders — or, at least, they appear to feature rather a lot. Cornelia Parker blew one up; Steve McQueen let one fall down; Mike Nelson installed one in the gallery; and Simon Starling converted one into a boat.

There are certainly a number of eye-catching pieces in this show. Anish Kapoor drowns the eye in a pool of bottomless colour, stirring some deep primal sense of the spiritual. Richard Long’s squiggly walk gives a postmodern twist to traditions that date back to prehistoric cave paintings. The cheek of Martin Creed, who offered nothing but dodgy electrics in his on-off light switch, is still provoking.

And as Brit Art comes in with the Nineties, as you step into the land of pickled and sliced creatures, cross-dressing potters and elephant-dung painters, you can still sense the buzz of energy that jostled the art world, not least when you encounter Damien Hirst’s cow in an aquarium. It took the Turner prize three years to recognise this joker in the Brit pack (Hirst had lost to the now-all-but-unknown Grenville Davey when he had first been shortlisted three years earlier) but his Mother and Child Divided stands alone in this show in its power to unsettle.

But the trouble with this show is that it feels like a series of extracted organs that have been floated in formaldehyde. The works look distant, remote, slightly warped. They have been bleached of their colour. The Turner loses its spirit when the winners are dissected out. The comparisons are the body of the prize, and it is the debate that lends it its soul. These are all missing — along with Tracey Emin’s unmade bed which, in 1999 (the year when everyone can remember who didn’t win), all but doubled attendance figures.

Curators try to resuscitate a sense of the argument by, for instance, displaying photographs of Rachel Whiteread’s House: her audacious cast of an entire terraced home. Fifteen years ago, when Whiteread won the Turner, this whipped up a furore. The piece was due for demolition by a tidy-minded local council that did not want this lump of concrete dumped on their land. Was it an eyesore or an artwork of international repute? Seldom has a work roused such widely differing opinion.

But mostly, the arguments are forgotten as the work of winners alone are pulled out from museums and private collections and presented like some fait accompli. Clusters of wall-texts may be there to jog the memory, but can you recall the controversy about plagiarism, for instance, that Glenn Brown’s painting caused? It was actually pretty significant.

Worse still, the Turner seems to be losing its power to provoke. Not since 2003, when the Chapmans did their best for it with their copulating blow-up dollies and desecrated Goya prints (which lost out to the slightly less controversial Grayson Perry), has it stirred anything more than a vague flicker of curiosity from the public. The tiny intellectual abstract paintings of Tomma Abts (who won last year) are hardly the fodder of ranting cab drivers.

The prize that turned contemporary art into a participation sport has perhaps proved a victim of its own success. After struggling to find its feet, shifting and adapting its rules, finding that its backers had gone bust (there was no prize in 1991), it was suddenly catapulted in front of a TV audience as Channel 4 became sponsors and the £10,000 that it had been worth in the Eighties was bumped up to £40,000 (although this was nothing in comparison with the sudden hike of value in the winner’s work).

The award became a playground for the Brit-pack. It could pull Madonna as a celebrity guest. And suddenly everybody was interested in contemporary culture. London was the world’s art capital. Tate Modern turned into a millennial success. The Frieze Art Fair became a focus of international markets. And all those kiddies who once wanted to be firemen would now prefer to be artists instead.

We are just too familiar with the contemporary to make a faff about the Turner. And the truth is it has begun to feel tedious. “It’s called the Turner because everyone gets a turn,” the Chapmans quipped. We can’t turn up four fresh talents a year. The shortlist feels less like a surprise than an orderly queue. And on top of that, its tripartite process occupies too much of the art-world calendar. First there is the announcement of the shortlisted artists; then the show of their work; then the selection the winner. As soon as you get to the end you’re round at the beginning again. It’s time the middle-aged Turner took a bit of a rest. Perhaps it should be presented only once every three years.

Turner Prize; A Retrospective is at Tate Britain, SW1 (020-7887 8888), from today until Jan 6

A prize collection of controversies

Only three women have won.

Four contenders have used a shed in their work.

Only five dedicated painters have won the prize.

Every artist on the 1984 shortlist (Howard Hodgkin, Richard Deacon, Richard Long and Gilbert & George) has won subsequently.

Antony Gormley described winning the prize as making him feel “like a Holocaust survivor”.

Grayson Perry, however, said it wasn’t just the icing on the cake but “the whole patisserie”.

The Turner winners

1984 Malcolm Morley
1985 Howard Hodgkin
1986 Gilbert & George
1987 Richard Deacon
1988 Tony Cragg
1989 Richard Long
1990 No prize
1991 Anish Kapoor
1992 Grenville Davey
1993 Rachel Whiteread
1994 Antony Gormley
1995 Damien Hirst
1996 Douglas Gordon
1997 Gillian Wearing
1998 Chris Ofili
1999 Steve McQueen
2000 Wolfgang Tillmans
2001 Martin Creed
2002 Keith Tyson
2003 Grayson Perry
2004 Jeremy Deller
2005 Simon Starling
2006 Tomma Abts

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