Turn up, tune in and drop off. That’s the mood of the Turner Prize exhibition this year. This award once played an important role in British culture, pulling contemporary artists out of their studios and putting them on the public stage. They may, as often as not, have been pelted with metaphorical eggs. But at least that was a sign of critical life.

If the critical monitor rises much higher than a brain-dead’s beep this year, I doubt it will be because of the Polish-born artist Goshka Macuga. Her contribution to the show, which opens at Tate Britain today, has the theatricality of a bike-rack outside an office window. An intellectually complex artist, Macuga, 40, is interested in the history of display, in the roles of curator and collector, in artists’ collaborations. But her installations tend to require a user’s manual. When her work is sufficiently quirky, we are prepared to consult it. This piece is about as visually intriguing as an airport lobby. A lot of visitors will cross it briskly en route to the next thing.

Runa Islam, 37, a Bangladeshi-born video artist who contributes a film of sleeping rickshaw drivers, is hardly ready to rouse the stranded imagination. She is interested in analysing the language of cinema - which she does, but so slowly and minutely that you start to want to scream. In her best piece, a woman dressed in white wanders into a porcelain gallery and starts breaking exhibits with a mad deliberation. Maybe this cultural take on the fairground china-smashing stall offers the emotional release that by this time we need.

Cathy Wilkes, 42, at least, has an instant visual impact. Her installation, complete with shop-window mannequins and supermarket checkout tills, might look rather like a post-credit-crunch branch of Tesco but the surreal assemblage of clutter soon starts the mind off on endless mysterious - and never resolved - lines of narrative. Wilkes is like a sinister Tracey Emin spinning strangely fetishistic, idiosyncratic tales.

But it is the other finalist, Mark Leckey, 43, who comes closest to capturing the chaotic flux of the contemporary - or at least he was the artist who most succeeded in making me feel old. Growing up in the underground dance culture of the Eighties, he sticks PostModernism on the turntable, spinning our culture about like some mad DJ, mixing and melding information on many different layers until - just as Garfield can play with a “real” cat and Homer Simpson stroll down an ordinary high street - a sense of fundamental reality flows away into an endless slipstream of sliding images and fragments and sounds. “All that is solid melts into air,” as Leckey puts it - pinching the quote, of course, from someone else.

The message seems to be that our cobbled-together culture can offer no certain meanings. No wonder the Turner Prize looks such a mess. The Brit pack’s visual one-liners, the short, sharp clarity of their shock, begin to feel positively cosy when compared with the confusing installations with which we now have to come to terms. These are not artworks in any traditional sense. They seem far less about objects than the connections between objects. They leave you to do the thinking.

Can you assemble an image of modern culture? A few will follow the plan. But it can prove very hard to keep focused. And I can't help thinking that this show will prove more like the returns desk of Ikea on a Monday morning. Lots of frustrated people will be left staring at a pile of inscrutable junk.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010