Turner Prize 2014 reviews: a 'frustratingly timid' year

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Turner Prize, which has in the past provoked outrage, indignation and anguished debate about the definition of art. But as the 2014 exhibition opens today critics are complaining that it is "frustratingly timid" and "underwhelming".

The Stuckists, a group of art agitators who normally protest against the Turner Prize, are not even demonstrating this year, notes Scottish newspaper The Herald. They apparently left a note outside Tate Britain saying the exhibition is full of "predictable and pathetic level of elitist repetition that is not worth bothering about".

The 2014 shortlist features no traditional painters or sculptors. Three of the four artists – Duncan Campbell, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell – use mostly film works, while the fourth Ciara Phillips is displaying handmade screen-prints.

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The Independent's Zoe Pilger complains that the exhibition is "frustratingly timid" and "swerves too often into the maddeningly derivative and lazily oblique".

The only moment in which Pilger says she felt enthralled was a second in Richards' film installation, Rosebud, when a budgerigar almost breaks free from captivity. The rest of the time, she says, she felt "irritated", and she adds that too much of the exhibition was "underwhelming".

The Evening Standard's Ben Luke praises Richards's Rosebud installation, which includes close-ups of art books from a Tokyo library with the genitalia scratched out to comply with censorship laws. But Luke says the artist's other works are "less compelling". He also found himself irritated at Vonna-Michell's "tense, fidgety narration" and says that Campbell's 54-minute film It for Others feels far too long.

"All of which means Ciara Phillips stands out a mile," says Luke. "Entering her daylight-filled space, with floor to ceiling prints in vivid colour, is electrifying."

But Jonathan Jones at The Guardian says Phillips and Campbell are not even worthy of being in the shortlist. "What happened?" he asks. "Has the pool of British art, after 30 years of the Turner, got too small to produce four decent young artists? Or are the judges unable to recognise mediocrity when they see it?"

He compares Phillips's exhibition to a "degree show" and accuses Campbell of being "monstrously arrogant" to show a film that is almost an hour long.

Nevertheless, Jones says Richards' "sphincter shots" have ensured the Turner Prize has still got its power to shock. "Provocative photographs with rude bits scratched out are intercut with footage showing the erotic use of flowers. In one sequence, a flower tickles an anus, which reacts by clenching shut," he says. "What a heartening way to celebrate 30 years of the Turner prize."

For Jones, it is the "strange genius" of Vonna-Michell that deserves to win the prestigious £25,000 art prize on 1 December.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph's Richard Dorment believes Campbell should win, describing his "ferocious intelligence, dry wit and a terrier-like tendency to keep on worrying his subject, long after you thought there'd be no more to say".

Dorment even gives the overall exhibition four stars, although explains from the off that the correct attitude towards the Turner Prize is "always to assume you'll hate everything in it and then hope to come away pleasantly surprised".