COULD Douglas Gordon's victory in the 1996 Turner Prize be the most significant event in the competition's history? Could it even be a milestone in contemporary art? Not if you believe those who tell you it was a poor year, and that Gordon was not even the best of a bad lot.
That, of course, is very much to miss the point. It means seeing the competition as a viable method of grading artists and at the same time ignores its' real significance. This year's award revealed something about the audience for art now. That audience need no longer be confined to those interested in good painting, or even Bad" painting, good sculpture or bad sculpture. Instead, they may consume something that speaks the same language as the culture that they experience every day, the language of film, television and video.
With works such as his 24 Hour Psycho (Hitchcock's classic projected slowed down so that it lasts an entire day) and his Turner show work, Confession Of A Justified Sinner (a twinned positive and negative projection of the 1932 Hollywood version of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story), Gordon shows himself cosier with mainstream culture than any previous winner of the competition.
All caught up with the business of looking and seeing, squeezing the images we take as neutral until their strangeness drips out, Gordon is producing work of urgent and, more importantly, general concern. His victory might just be Pop's long overdue fruition, a flare signal announcing that contemporary art's long creep away from popular culture is over.
It might seem as though that particular landmark had been surpassed some time ago. After all, art in video has now been around for close to 30 years. What is extraordinary here is that with the award, the everyday business of treating everything - from Jaki Irvine's quietly dazzling video installation, Eyelashes, to Wendy, Houston's dance diary performance, Haunted, to any Saturday morning's Chart Show - as though it had something to say about the shape of the world has found its greatest legitimation. Taking things seriously has never been so popular.
This year, taking Seinfeld seriously, taking The Larry Sanders Show seriously, taking Frazier seriously, band even Friends seriously was legitimated by the Turner Prize. If that scares you if the American tone, the zinc like quasiautism or the dry, narcissistic quality of these sitcoms makes you shiver rather than guffaw - don't fret. It wasn't really that important to laugh in 1996. What really counted was joining in the communal assessment: that's funny.
