“There will be no miracles here”. The billboard-style message that glows from one of the galleries seems unfortunately prophetic. Nathan Coley, its creator, is fascinated by the idea of faith. In an era of moral uncertainties, he suggests, art may stand as a substitute for lost religious ideals.

But, if that is so, few prayers will be answered.

This year’s Turner Prize show, staged for the first time at Tate Liverpool, is unlikely to attract many disciples. This award may, in past incarnations, have transmuted mundane matter into high culture; it may have miraculously multiplied the numbers who found a fresh interest in contemporary art, but this year there is little to draw even the most devoted.

Mark Wallinger, who should be the winner, certainly seems to have lost faith in the prize. He was shortlisted for his installation State Britain, which replicated the antiwar campaign of Brian Haw, who a short while previously had been evicted from his site in Parliament Square. By recreating Mr Haw’s display within the confines of Tate Britain, Wallinger reinstated the protest within a legal zone. This consistently thoughtful and rigorous artist pulled off a deft political coup and gave art a power that it seemed to have lost with the navel-gazing Brit pack.

Perhaps disillusioned after he failed to win the prize when first shortlisted 12 years ago, Wallinger makes do with submitting an old work. Sleeper, a film in which the artist, dressed in a bear suit, shuffles around a Mies van der Rohe building in Berlin, has complex political implications.

It is about the state informers, “the sleepers”, who once sneaked about the city, about the invisible barriers that divide populations, about the bears of Berlin Zoo that, apparently, will never procreate.

But in the context of this year’s Turner display, the pseudo-ursine with its gormless grin seems as much to reflect the vacuous gapes of the visitors as political truths.

Little wonder. Like the bear, we seem constantly to be coming up against brick walls. Zarina Bhimji certainly photographs a lot of them. And though her video work Waiting, in which a sisal factory breathes with a waving, wafty life, has a lyrical beauty, the rather misty poeticism probably needs rather a lot of background explanation before it gets any profound message across. Maybe that is why Mike Nelson will probably win this year.

The Turner Prize is supposedly awarded for work produced over the previous year, but it is by the work presented in the exhibition that the artists seem principally to be judged.

None of this year’s contenders really captures the imagination, but Nelson at least traps us physically in his labyrinthine installation. We peer through a hole into illusory hall-of-mirror spaces. We gaze out across a desert.

This may seem a symbol of this year’s Turner Prize. But at least its wastelands are speckled with far-off lights.

Tate Liverpool, Friday October 19 to Sunday January 13

www.tate.org.uk/liverpool 0845 6001354

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