The Turner Prize shortlist is perfectly OK

Though there's no Michelangelo among this year's Turner Prize nominees, the exhibition of their work is no disgrace, either. But it's still far from essential viewing

The four artists on the shortlist for this year's Turner Prize are Glenn Brown, Tomoko Tak-ahashi, Wolfgang Tillmans and Michael Raedecker, and an exhibition of some of their work can now be seen in four galleries of Tate Britain. Around the time of last year's Turner Prize, I remember some knowing person saying that it was no good being too sniffy about the shortlist: nobody was claiming these guys were Michelangelo; take them for what they were, just four basically OK, quite interesting artists - OK?

The four artists on the shortlist for this year's Turner Prize are Glenn Brown, Tomoko Tak-ahashi, Wolfgang Tillmans and Michael Raedecker, and an exhibition of some of their work can now be seen in four galleries of Tate Britain. Around the time of last year's Turner Prize, I remember some knowing person saying that it was no good being too sniffy about the shortlist: nobody was claiming these guys were Michelangelo; take them for what they were, just four basically OK, quite interesting artists - OK?

Well, OK. This is the way with prizes. The "best" is the enemy of the good. The four artists shortlisted any year might conceivably be the best artists of that year; at the same time, they might not be very good. It's bound to happen, and it's nobody's fault, exactly. But as for saying "go easy, because we're not claiming much" - what sort of concession is being requested? Isn't it just a way of saying: don't bother? For you could say, the thing about art is, there is only the one league. Nobody is top of the third division, or best of the under-12s. There are no handicaps, no marks for effort, no allowances. Everyone is judged equally by the same impossibly high standards. Basically OK is basically nowhere.

High ideals, I know. And we whose living involves knocking around art galleries are the first to settle for less. The basically OK is our stock in trade. Mustn't grumble, we say, could be worse, could be a lot worse... and it certainly could be. We've seen some sorry stuff, we know how bad art can get. So we lower our sights, and we make do. We talk up any encouraging signs. We praise loudly the perfectly adequate, and the not too bad, considering. We're human. We need to keep cheerful.

As for the judges of the Turner Prize, they are (in effect) under a contractual obligation to keep cheerful. Think how startling it would be if, one year, the Prize wasn't awarded, because there was no art that deserved it (a roll-over year). Well, it would be inconceivable.

Imagine the scene, the live coverage on Channel 4, Sir Nicholas Serota at the podium: terribly difficult decision, long and serious deliberation, very sad to announce, no prize to be given this year, nothing good enough, sorry. Imagine the faces of the gallery owners, and the collectors, and the Patrons of New Art - stunned, disoriented, having to be helped away.

Now, there are prizes like that - the Leeds Piano Competition, for example, has been known not to award its top prize. These are prizes that have their eye primarily on whatever it is they're a prize for. And any prize that cannot not be awarded is really a joke prize. All our high profile art and book prizes are joke prizes. They're a joke because they're based on an obvious fiction: the pretence that creativity in their particular field is in a permanently flourishing state.

This year, for example, would be a year when the Prize might quite reasonably not be awarded. Of the four artists shortlisted, all in their thirties, some are surely better than others. If you had to pick a winner, at gunpoint, then doubtless you could. But none of them is anything amazing. I doubt whether even the jury really thinks so.

On the other hand, those who scry the Turner Prize for portents of the way things are going could be quite interested in this year's list. There is no film or video work. There are photos which are pretty much straight down the line photography (as opposed to art that uses photography), indicating that now any photographer might in theory be eligible for the Prize. And there are two painters, one of whom is very nearly the sort of painter people have in mind when they say "why are there no painters on the Turner Prize shortlist?" He has, to a high degree, some traditional-style skills.

Naturally, there's a twist. Glenn Brown paints copies. He started off painting copies of reproductions of Frank Auerbach paintings, so Auerbach's broad, loaded, textural brushstrokes were rendered with deceiving accuracy - streak by glistening streak - but absolutely flat. It was a boggling illusion, and careful flat painting that minutely imitates a freer, more fluid kind has stayed an element in Brown's work.

But it's got cleverer too, mixing together bags of references to high art, low art, slightly dodgy art, setting up clashes and strange likenesses. There are meetings of John Martin's highly detailed apocalypses with highly detailed sci-fi illustration. Imitation expressionistic brushwork is introduced into a Fragonard portrait, like a rash of vermicelli. A subject will be borrowed from one source, a style from another, a colour scheme from somewhere else again, and a fusion achieved with consummate slickness - leaving you with bewildered responses, not quite sure what to feel, or indeed why such bewilderment (the almost universal rhetoric of contemporary art) is supposed to be so interesting. Tomoko Takahashi makes extravagant junk-rooms, gallery-filling installations of what is often called rubbish - though many of her ingredients are clearly shop bought. At the Tate, visitors file through a mounting and dangling mêlée of pot-plants, road-signs, office furniture, car tyres, gadgets, spilled board-games; and the general idea is to create a cheerful sense of total mess, within which may also be perceived hints of schemes, themes and connections.

So it's about order and chaos, which is not so great. I like it when she gets real compost-heap effects, disparate things meshed together so you can hardly feel their differences. But really, Takahashi's messes are superficial art-director's messes, a very tidy person's idea of untidiness. They're assembled with no sculptural sense. And the fact that anything can be connected to anything else is just a fact, fairly well known.

Wolgang Tillmans takes studiedly casual photos of faces, body-parts, household objects, naked young people, bits of clothing, bits of pavement, bits of sky. Prints are shown in all sizes, unframed, high and low, dotted and grouped with studied casualness around the walls. Put together, they become a statement of "the way we live now", studiedly casual glimpses of a studiedly casual lifestyle, a tedious hymn of self-regarding boho authenticity.

Michael Raedecker's pictures I like, but I'm not sure if I understand why. He paints pale, dim and desolate landscapes, sometimes views, sometimes the ground from above, with very few elements, almost monochrome, and the perspective often goes funny. And then there's his distinctive device, the local outbreaks of texture and embroidery thread sewn on to the canvas in neat lines, or glued-on furry blobs of wool, or straying tangled webs, or fields of tufts.

People talk of art/craft crossover, but it's not anything as boring as that. These fabric additions, though they have a representational role - making a clump of foliage say, or an area of shady crosshatching - at the same time act as blank spots in the painting, covering over what they depict. But this effect is rescued from being a bald paradox by the delicacy of the fabric work. It's a world of very careful mystery Raedecker conjures; I think that's the trick.

And yet, how often do you see some art which makes you think: I'm lucky to be here, and if I'd missed this, it would have been tragic? Most art has no special necessity. It's just doing its job. It exists because there's a career called artist, and an artworld that needs a steady supply of art, and a public who from habit, fashion or hope go along to see it, and know how to say: I quite liked this or I didn't much like that - and the system is just ticking over.

As here. These are four artists who do the art-job in a perfectly OK way. They are tickers-over. If you normally go to this kind of show, then you may as well go to this one too, and then you'll be able to have a view of some kind and talk about it later.

But if you don't go to it, don't even think of losing a wink of sleep.

Turner Prize 2000: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1; every day, to 14 Jan; admission £3. Winner announced 28 Nov