Damien Hirst and the Turner Prize were made for one another. So who is worth sticking on the short list this time round? By David Cohen

THE smartest thing among the cognoscenti this summer is to mutter about painting 'coming back' after being ousted from fashionable exhibitions in the late 1980s by multi-media concoctions, installation and photography.

THE TURNER Prize for contemporary British art has never failed to excite controversy, and now that we know the shortlist for the 1993 award we can say with certainty that this year will be no exception. Whoever wins, the popular reaction (or the reaction of the philistine and uninitiated classes, depending on where you stand) will be indignant, mocking and hostile.

WONDERFUL LIFE: it's a great title, anyway. The Lisson Gallery's current group show takes its name from the book by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould. The subject of the book is the Burgess shale, a site in British Columbia which was found to hold the fossil remains of a wide range of soft-bodied creatures - evidence of that vast proliferation of life-forms known to paleontology as the Cambrian Explosion. The shale contained fossils of many more creatures - many more kinds of creature, that is - than now exist in the oceans. The application to this exhibition is not hard to find, though it's nothing whatsoever to do with biology.

THE MOST expensive contemporary sculpture in London last week comprised two fibreglass hemispheres covered in magenta pigment looking at each other - or maybe listening to each other.

COUNTLESS mediocre 19th-century academic painters cashed in on the vogue for exotic subjects, travelling to far-off places and painting almost pornographic pictures with titles like In the Harem, cloyingly sentimental pictures with titles like The Dusky Bride, busily scenic pictures with titles like Market Scene, Cairo. They understood the market value of exoticism, the saleability of a touch of Eastern promise. These days, of course, no one takes that kind of thing seriously. It has been seen through, thoroughly decoded and deconstructed: colonialist, imperialist, politically incorrect in just about every way, and aesthetically dull with it. We're not going to fall for anything like that again. But hang on a minute. Maybe we have.

SO WHAT if men are aggressive, designed to be hunters and to fend off danger? Laurie Booth is different. One of Britain's most gifted choreographers, his style is fluid, silky, strangely silent, physical but not macho. With River Run, he creates a tender and intimate piece in which he and his company of four others quietly trust themselves, each other and their Ice Age world. Their calm is enormously comforting in this arctic limbo.

MAURICE Bejart is a choreographer who thinks in capital letters, so his 65-minute ballet Opera is not just about dancing to a string of Verdi highlights. It is (according to his programme note) about Art, Religion and Politics - and the Soul of Italy too.