Traditionalists who turn up at Tate Britain will find a few art works to make them harrumph. This year’s Turner Prize exhibition includes all the usual ingredients. Here are such mad concepts as a pulverized jet engine transformed into a moonscape.

Here are experimental materials from compacted carbon to bovine brain matter. And here is the customary shock factor which, courtesy of Enrico David, takes the form of a glimpse at a gay man’s bottom complete with thong-type contraption, some suspiciously pornographic dollies and the face of Kenneth Williams thrown in to boot.

But, if you enjoy huffing and puffing about the deplorable state of contemporary art, this year’s Turner Prize will probably prove disappointing.

A show that at first glance feels rather insubstantial turns out on consideration to be subtle and often intriguing in mood. Gone are the visual one-liners of the would-be inheritors of the Brit-Art mantle: the ersatz Emins and the Damien derivatives. Apart from David’s surrealistic cabaret-style installation there is little to test the parameters of taste.

David’s aesthetic stands out as different - but not because it is the best. The best works are not interested in shocking. They are about ways of seeing. The Turner Prize contributors go back to visual basics. Lucy Skaer provides a good starting point.

As she examines the interplay between the real object and its representation, between the detail and the whole, she encourages the visitor to peer, pry and peep. Her contribution may feel decidedly bitty, but as you puzzle and ponder and try to put it together you find yourself focusing on the act of looking itself.

Her contribution feels almost like a preparation for the shimmering wall painting of Richard Wright, a rippling field of delicately gilded patterns unfurling gradually as you perambulate their length. This work is as allusive as it is elusive. You may sense Tiepolo references, tap into Blakean mysteries or feel Turneresque atmospheres but try to pin them down and they dissolve away. Wright’s work is typically temporary and responds directly to its architectural surroundings. But perhaps its spirit evaporates in the blandness of the public gallery space.

Roger Hiorns work has an equally nebulous quality. An artist seemingly driven by the desire to analyse his materials, to test the parameters of modern technologies, sets us contemplating an atomized jet engine like some memento mori, or staring like cud-chewing bovines at sculptures that incorporate the minced brains of cattle: matter that, presumably, was once capable of contemplation and thought.

The contributions to this year’s Turner Prize show share a quiet, meditative quality. They encourage the viewer to puzzle and ponder not pontificate or huff and puff. This is a subtle show which marks an optimistic upturn for the Turner. And you might even hear that old-fashioned word “beauty” bandied about - not least when it comes to Hiorns who deserves to be the winner.

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