As its 2006 shortlist is announced, Aidan Dunne looks at the evolution of the Turner Prize and its Irish equivalents

While there aren't any Irish artists as such included in the four-person shortlist for this year's Turner Prize, the Kerlin Gallery and the Douglas Hyde Gallery must be pleased that they are linked to two of the artists, one of whom has been a frequent visitor to Dublin. The Kerlin has shown the work of Phil Collins for some time, and German-born painter Tomma Abts had a solo show of her paintings and drawings at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. Collins was based for a time in Belfast and has exhibited in Dublin in several contexts over the years.

The other two shortlisted artists are sculptor Rebecca Warren and multi-media artist Mark Titchner.

While Tate supremo and Turner jury chairman Sir Nicholas Serota is quoted as saying that the selection points to the "extraordinary depth" of the British art scene, it has to be sid that, in line with recent years, it is a relatively low-key list, eschewing big names in favour of more peripheral figures.

The Turner Prize has evolved considerably since its inception in 1984. Designed to raise the profile of contemporary art, its shortlists make up a roll-call of the best-known artists of the last 25 years.

It has been enormously successful, yet it was to some extent wrong-footed by the advent of the Young British Artists, and has had to catch up. Then, around 2000, there was a perceptible change of emphasis, perhaps in a bid to regain the initiative. With some notable exceptions, the majority of shortlisted and winning artists since then have tended to be low-profile. These days people almost expect Turner winners to be novelty turns, so it hardly raised an eyebrow when the prize went to a cross-dressing potter, Grayson Perry, in 2003, as though he was just the sort of candidate the prize was designed for.

There is a more sedate air to this year's shortlist. For his video installation, they shoot horses, Collins recruited young Palestinians to engage in a disco marathon in Ramallah. The title refers to Sydney Pollack's 1969 film based on dance marathons in the Depression-era US. Collins's work often comes across as being poised on an edge between exploitation of and empathy with its subjects, but underlying everything he does is a view of art as a social forum exempt from the debilitating preconceptions of political and cultural prejudice.

As for Tomma Abts, there is an obsessive-compulsive quality to her abstract paintings, which are made according to arbitrary rules and aims. Rebecca Warren's clay sculptures, meanwhile, have a deliberately clumsy look. Female forms with vastly exaggerated bulges and curves, they are said to lampoon Rodin and Degas, though they could equally allude to a body culture of cosmetic enhancement. Finally, the frenetic overkill of Mark Titchner's work, in which meaningless slogans and motifs are celebrated and multiplied, doesn't so much comment on as partake of information overload. As of now, all four artists will be planning their shortlist exhibition pieces.

So successful was the Turner Prize that the Irish Museum of Modern Art devised its own more short-lived Irish version, the Glen Dimplex Artists Award. The Nissan Art Project and the Eurojet Futures, both latterly based at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, took up the baton, with the Futures, as the title suggests, looking more to emerging artists. The AIB Art Prize, cautiously inaugurated five years ago, has gradually become a major annual event in the Irish art world. It targets artists who are at a crucial transitional moment in their careers. With past winners of the calibre of Amanda Coogan and Paul Doran, it can claim to have achieved critical mass.

• The winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced on Dec 4, following an exhibition which opens at Tate Britain in Oct