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's healthy bank balance is the reason given by the for its decision to cut the funding agency's budget by an additional £5m over and above the 3% reduction being applied across the rest of the sector.

This creates a precedent that could see arts institutions across the land being asked to realise assets such as bank savings and buildings to fund their activity in lieu of a reduced government grant.

Like many of the nation's major arts institutions, the Arts Council has reserves. It is being singled out because the DCMS says that the £18.4m it has in savings is made up from years of under-spent government subsidy. The Arts Council strenuously denies this, saying that the money is made up from numerous sources including donations, and that the only reason it has not been spent is because the previous administration prevented it from doing so.

Notwithstanding the prudence of having some reserves in place - the Charity Commission stresses the need for a responsible "reserves policy" - and the negative message it could send to future donors to the arts - a group the coalition government has been at pains to say it wants to encourage - the move by the DCMS will be seen by many as ominous. That's because you could describe the £5m not as a cut but as a realisation of an arts institution's asset by the new government - money that was once in the arts cashed in to help fund the national debt.

Put another way, it would be like an employer reducing the salaries of all its employees by 3%, then cutting the salary of Shelly Jones from IT by a further 1% because she has saved a bit each month and put it aside. Shelly would feel that the company was banking her cash.

The arts sector would like the DCMS to be clear about the precedent it has set by directly attributing the Arts Council's £5m additional cut to its assets. Will the same approach be taken with other arts institutions? It's certainly not being ruled out. The DCMS says:

"It's not possible to anticipate what decisions will be made in the autumn spending review, although given the unprecedented £156bn fiscal deficit, it is clear that DCMS and its bodies will need to play a full part in the ongoing deficit reduction."

The department went on to say that part of the plan is "giving museums access to their historic reserves". I asked whether that was meant as a way of reducing the amount of government subsidy they received, as is the case with the Arts Council.

"It would not be appropriate to pre-empt the forthcoming spending review by making decisions now about spending that may or may be in or out of scope."

One senior figure in the arts I spoke to about being asked to cash in their assets simply said: "If the DCMS want to interfere to that extent, to penalise us for being prudent and having reserves, that's fine. I'll simply hand them the keys and tell them to run the institution."

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(adjective)
  • to be desired or approved of
  • pleasing and welcome

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The first cut is the deepest, we're told by Cat Stevens, as he was back in 1967. It's a nice song, but the man's got it wrong. At least he has if you run an arts institution in the early 21st Century.

The first cut announced today of £61m to the general pot (there was another £27m cut for the Olympics) is a mere paper cut - annoying but bearable. The knife doesn't come out until later in the year.

Today's announcement amounts to an immediate cut of 3% across the board, which equates to about £1.8m for the British Museum, £4.2m for English Heritage, £3.9m for the British Library and £2.5m for the Tate. Not insignificant, but manageable, as I wrote last week.

Actually, it will feel a bit more than 3% as the financial year for the subsidised arts sector is April to April. So the announcement of the cut for the current year coming nearly two months into it means that the institutions will have to scrabble back more than 3% over the remaining 10 months to hit the 3% target. Again, that shouldn't be a major problem for them.

That comes in the autumn when the Treasury announces how much the arts sector is going to receive in government subsidy for the next three years, starting April 2011. As one government insider told me, "that's when the real cuts will come".

Maybe they won't make any further cuts. Maybe England will win the World Cup. I wouldn't bet on either.

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Yinka Shonibare's sculpture , which was unveiled this morning sitting atop Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth, has a lot of interesting stories to tell us.

• There's all the technical detail about the protective coatings applied to the sails to prevent the sun from fading them and the many tiny fans that are built into the object to keep the temperature within a 10-degree range and stop the build-up of condensation.

• Of course, there's the "making-of" story: how the perspex bottle was made in Italy, then craned into a London studio for the insertion of the scale replica of Nelson's HMS Victory. Once that process had been undertaken - in secret - Shonibare's team clambered into the bottle to add the finishing touches, which you can see in .

• There is the fact that Shonibare is the first black artist to be commissioned to make a work for the fourth plinth and the whole meaning of the piece as outlined by the artist. It's a celebration of Britain's multi-cultural society, which Shonibare attributes in part to Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar: the seas were freed for the British to build their Empire; subsequently, individuals and families from countries within that Empire arrived in Britain.

• Let's not forget the material used for the sails. These are not the bright white sheets of Nelson's original; they're made of a richly patterned fabric more commonly associated with African dress, a regular motif in Shonibare's work. But the fabric isn't from Africa; it's from Brixton market. The reason it is associated with African dress is not indigenous craftsmanship but the mass production of the material by the Dutch, who sold it to their West African colonies. The design, in fact, is not even African: it's based on Indonesian batik.

• And given that the artist wanted to directly relate to the history and symbolism of Trafalgar Square, the nugget I have most enjoyed concerns Nelson's victory. Bobbing about on the Atlantic waiting for the enemy to turn up, the great admiral came up with a cunning plan. Instead of fighting the enemy fleet in the traditional manner, with ships alongside each other, Nelson decided to attack in two perpendicular columns. Although he died during the battle, his orders were executed to great effect and henceforth, Britain had control of the seas.

So if it was symbolism the artist was after, adding a second column - alright, plinth - to join the existing Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, was an inspired gesture.

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Here's my film about the choreographer Hofesh Shechter that went out on Newsnight yesterday evening. Hopefully the film tells you all you need to know about him.

What it doesn't say is how the premiere of , his first full-length dance piece, went last night. I couldn't be there because I was editing the film, but I have spoken to some senior people in the contemporary dance world who were there; they tell me it was one of the most extraordinary nights of theatre they have ever witnessed.

Apparently the audience gave the show a huge and prolonged standing ovation and I'm hearing comments like "it is a complete game-changer." We'll have to wait and see what the reviewers have to say, and I'll have to wait till 14 July to see it for myself.

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"Women don't count," I was told firmly by a high-profile novelist recently. "Blimey, don't they?" I replied, genuinely taken aback.

"No, it's a very male thing," she said. "I stop writing when I've had enough, then I pour myself a drink. Why would I want to count how many words I have written?"

The insight into this particular writer's approach to her craft was being offered to me in response to a question I had posed based on the notion that John Updike wrote 3,000 words a day without fail.

I have no idea if it was true, but it was a good enough peg for me to ask the author for a daily word count.

I was puzzled by her response. How could anybody possibly sit down at a computer, spend the whole day bashing out words and then not want to count them up at the end?

It would be like being on a diet, abstaining with great discipline all week and then not wanting to step on the bathroom scales - it's a fundamental part of the process. Isn't it?

Apparently not for women. And the author in question should know, it was Kate Mosse, co-founder of the .

To be fair, she was making a flippant remark not stating a fact on behalf of all female writers, but the broader point she was making, was that women think differently. This led a conversation onto female representation in the arts.

We played the Name Game: name five famous 20th Century American male artists. Easy: Warhol, Rothko, Pollock, Judd, Rauschenberg.

Now, in the same amount of time, name five famous 20th Century American female artists. Still easy? How about naming five famous male playwrights from the year 1500 to 1999?

Now name five famous female playwrights - that's anywhere in the world over 500 years; or five female composers, photographers, graphic designers or film directors.

We failed. And that's why she set up the Orange Prize for Fiction. She said it was initially in response to the Booker Prize shortlist of 1991 that didn't include any women.

This struck her and some colleagues as odd, seeing as there was plenty of quality fiction being written by women. A meeting was called in a North London flat that was attended by many of publishing's big hitters (men and women).

The group concluded that the written male voice was considered to be inclusive and neutral, while the female writer's voice was considered to be female.

What shocked the group most though, was the fact that there was no public comment made regarding the 1991 all-male shortlist. Would there, they wondered, have been no comment if the shortlist were all-female?

Five years later, in 1996, the Orange Prize for Fiction was launched, as a women-only competition. The founders figured that this was the only way to provide a platform on which a serious discussion about contemporary literature written by women could be had.

Making it a women-only prize removed the writer's gender as a consideration when judging a book for its literary merits.

Now in its 15th year, the Orange Prize is well established and has played a part in the Booker Prize's growing recognition of female writers. In the early 1990s, 11% of the Booker shortlist was female; now it is 38%.

Kate Mosse and others have helped shift perceptions about women's contribution to contemporary fiction. But what about elsewhere in the arts?

There are no female directors in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. There has only been one female winner of the Turner Prize in the past decade.

And not only are most of the UK's arts institutions currently run by men, most of them have never been run by a woman.

The arts are exciting and important because the document, challenge and shape society. So what does the current lack of recognition of female creativity say about us all in 2010?

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Jeremy Hunt, the new Minister for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport was out of the blocks and on to the telly with impressive speed, appearing on Newsnight on Wednesday when the kiss on the coalition cheek was still wet. Maybe such zest just happens when you stick the word "Olympic" into a job title? He's certainly wasted no time in thinking about cutting the arts budget.

He mused that his budget would be cut by £66m should the Treasury grim reaper chose to apply his scythe even-handedly; the discomfort in his body language suggested he suspected this wouldn't be the case. He then voiced a question he is asking himself and his team, which is: "Can we save this money without affecting our core services?"

That's like asking "I wonder if my car will run on olive oil?" You won't know until you've tried, but at the very least some modification will probably be required. Hunt and his team are unlikely to employ expensive consultants to help answer the question - you tend to have been in government a bit longer before you turn to that approach. Anyway, he already has a few targets in mind, which he made clear in the run-up to the election.

He thinks that is wasteful and will be looking for a significant cut in the amount it spends on administration. Such a cut looks like an easy win on paper, but how do you make informed investments and rigorously monitor them without specialist personnel overseeing the process? It's an easy cut to make, but it might prove costly for all in the medium term.

But whether it's £66m, which equates to roughly a 3% cut, or several million either side, the arts institutions that receive public subsidy should largely be able to cope. That's not because they are sitting on big cash reserves or because they are woefully inefficient and will welcome the chance to clear out some dead wood. The reason that, for the most part, they will deal with the blow is two-fold:

• Arts institutions have been expecting cuts for some time and have developed business plans that accommodate a reduction in "core funding"
• A moderate cut in public subsidy is not the biggest threat facing the subsidised arts sector

Typically, but not universally, arts institutions generate a significant amount of their own money. They do this through commercial means: box office, restaurants, merchandise, corporate sponsorship, partnerships and so on, and also through philanthropy via individuals or trusts and foundations. Many institutions run on this basis: one third public subsidy; one third commercial activity; one third sponsorship and philanthropy.

This means that, in business-speak, our arts institutions are fairly "highly geared". Put more bluntly, they are financially exposed. Say, for example, you are a medium-sized theatre with a turnover of £12m, of which £4m - a third - comes from the public purse. The government decides to cut Mr Hunt's departmental budget by a whopping 10%, which he then passes on to your theatre. That would result in you losing £400,000 out of your total turnover of £12m. Obviously you won't be giving the decision a standing ovation, but you'll get by.

But say that at the same time, the government decides to implement other cuts in public spending to reduce the county's budget deficit. At the very least, it will make everyone feel nervous about spending, and will also very probably lead to job losses. History tells us that the arts do OK when the public is feeling the pinch - eight quid to go to the movies or a free trip to a museum provide cheap solace in troubled times - but the "secondary spend" on coffees, catalogues and cards could well nose-dive. The same could apply to corporate sponsorship. Even if a company is doing well, it may not seem right to spend evenings quaffing champagne after days making people redundant.

There are already signs that some arts institutions are finding a reduction in income due to fewer people going to their shops and restaurants and that this is starting to bite. Take a look at the major organisations which have already received substantial additional hand-outs from . To my knowledge, there are at least two major arts venues with balance sheets that have more red on them than a Freddy Krueger victim, a fact that will only become public once their accounts are filed early next year.

In my experience, our arts institutions are reasonably well run. Their staff work hard and are not particularly well paid. Management tends to be entrepreneurial. But the success they have enjoyed over the past 15 years has been driven as much by the buoyant economy as by government hand-outs. When the recession of 2009 took hold, arts institutions began to struggle as corporate sponsorship shrunk. But they were saved severe pain because the public continued to spend and the subsidy remained stable.

It is now seems likely that public subsidy will be reduced together with an overall cut in government spending. If that leads to the general public paying out less and staying in more, then Mr Hunt and his colleagues will be pondering not how "we save this money without affecting our core services" but more "how can we save our core services?"

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Cannes: There are over 1,000 films at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which means it's horribly possible to spend your entire time watching duds. Cannes is a game of chance; we hacks are like metal detector enthusiasts who go out each weekend with hopes of finding treasure but know the odds are stacked against them.

Well, on Thursday, just 24 hours after the festival opened, I struck gold.

It was in the relative backwater of the Director's Fortnight that I stumbled on a French documentary called . It opens with a middle-aged man with polio dancing on a dusty street in the Congolese city of Kinshasa.

The story then moves onto its main subject: a group of musicians that goes by the name of Staff Benda Bilili. The words "benda bilili" mean "beyond appearances"; for this band of brothers, it's a statement with profound meaning.

The group's original core is made up of three paraplegic middle-aged street-dwellers who live in cardboard boxes in this lawless city and stay sane by making music. They are joined by a 12-year-old drummer and by Roger, a 13-year-old runaway who makes music by connecting a tin can to a stick with a piece of nylon.

They are remarkable: their music, their spirit, their humour, their existence. The film is made by Renaud Barret and Florent do la Tullaye, who were unhappy in their jobs in advertising and photo-journalism before embarking on this adventure. It was while making another film about Congolese music that they happened on these musical men of the street.

They started to befriend the elder and soul of the band, Papa Ricky; after becoming enchanted by their music, they decided to help Staff Benda Bilili make a recording. At the time, they had no idea that this commitment would take five years, or that it would change the lives of all of those involved.

Early in the making of the movie, band member Coco Yakala mused: "One day, we will be the most famous disabled men in all of Africa." It turned out to be a prescient but parochial vision. When the album, Tres Tres Fort, was eventually released in 2009, it precipitated a European tour which was attended by sell-out crowds and which elicited some truly wonderful footage.

I don't want to spoil any part of this documentary, but to give a sense of the musicians' take on life, I'll point to one sequence when the band is relaxing after a show in Denmark. They're knocking back some whisky but start to hanker after some weed. They discuss how disapproving Western society is of such behaviour and that they would inevitably end up in lots of trouble. They look at the alarm sensors in the corner of the room and recognise them as specially-designed, high-powered, super-sensitive marijuana detectors. This observation results in them sticking to the whisky - while rolling a sizeable joint.

Not surprisingly, the entire cinema audience rose for a standing ovation. Something you too can do if you choose .

There are bound to be parallels between this film and the Ry-Cooder-inspired, Wim-Wenders-directed 1999 documentary, . There are similarities, but the difference with this story is that if it weren't true, it would be unbelievable.

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Cannes: The Cannes Film Festival opens today. This year it has had to overcome ash clouds, freak waves, Greece's financial meltdown and sniping from the sidelines about a perceived weakness in the films on view.

Well from where I am sitting - a beachside cafe just off the Croisette - the show is well and truly on.

To my right a Rolls-Royce cabriolet nuzzles up against a matt-black Ferrari while women strut by with pooches in pouches and dazzle passing aircraft with their toothy smiles.

Marquees are popping up around me on the beach like candles on a birthday cake. It's like 200 concurrent wedding receptions taking place, all paid for by a rich bloke with no taste.

People here don't have eyes, they have Ray-Bans. It is magnificent and surreal, alluring yet repulsive.

The strangeness of being here is heightened at this precise time in British history. As is the case in the UK right now, everybody in Cannes is talking about the behind-closed-door secret deals and the gossip from inside the parties. And yet there is no mention of Cameron or Clegg or Miliband or Cable.

It's about Cate Blanchett, Jean-Luc Godard and Harvey Weinstein and takes place on capacious yachts and breezy seaside rooftop bars.

You can see the Brits from a mile away. They're the ones who look dog-tired and light-headed. Not from being 24-hour party people, but from being 24-hour news addicts, watching and listening to every political twist and turn from back home.

At least there's plenty of British representation at this year's Cannes to make the homesick hack feel at least a little connected with events across the Channel.

I've just stepped out of the first screening of Robin Hood, Ridley Scott's take on the well-known story. Russell Crowe is doing for Robin Hood what Daniel Craig did for James Bond.

That is to do away with all wry one-liners and get stuck into proper action-adventure mode; all humour dispensed with to be replaced by sweeping camera moves and sound design as in your face as one of Robin's arrows. At the end nobody clapped and nobody booed, which seemed about right.

Elsewhere there's a new movie from Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) called Tamara Drewe which is adapted from Posy Simmonds' graphic novel and Guardian comic strip.

Alicia Duffy directs All Good Children, her first feature film, a story based on Sam Taylor's novel The Republic of Trees. Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright sees his play Chatroom turned into a film starring Hannah Murray from Skins and Carey Mulligan is in the much-anticipated Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps.

And then there is the competition proper that starts tomorrow. Britain is represented by two directors, veterans Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, plus the script for Fair Game which has been written by John and Jez Butterworth and stars Naomi Watts.

But the film I am most looking forward to seeing is Mathieu Amalric's competition opener, Tournee (On Tour).

It's a movie with the perfect : a comedy about a group of American burlesque strippers on tour in the French provinces. It was probably funded by the time the lift doors opened on the seventh floor.

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The contemplative silence in the gallery is broken by Sir Nicholas Serota's noisy entrance. He doesn't declare his arrival with a bellowed salutation; that would be vulgar. It's the click, click, click of his shoes on the bare wooden floors of Tate Modern that heralds his appearance.

His presence at Tate, where he has been in charge since 1987, is such that the disembodied sound of his shoes has the same effect on his staff as the clock-eating crocodile has on Captain Hook (I know - I worked for him for 7 years).

Interviewing him now, just a few months after receiving a generous Serota send-off, is a bit weird. It is the journalist's stock-in-trade to ask searching and personal questions: to be a dispassionate inquisitor. Giving your old boss the once-over while the ink is still wet on your leaving card feels plain impertinent.

Still, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. In this video, Serota talks about the past, present and future of Tate Modern.

Then off he goes, the echoing timbre of his shoes leaving a reminder of his recent presence like a vapour trail.

I suspect the sound that Serota's shoes emit is produced by blakeys, those half-moon metal strips that attach to the heel of a shoe to prevent it from wearing down. They give more away about him than he himself ever would: they are quintessentially public-school, British, officer-class, authoritative, hard-wearing, cost-effective, sensible, singular, frugal, practical and in a low-key way, ever-so-slightly flamboyant.

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is closing on Broadway less than two weeks after its official opening. That's bad for the producers, for the cast and for any American theatre-goers who will now have to travel to .

There will be lots of conjecture as to why a show that was a hit with London audiences failed to do impress New Yorkers. Already this morning there is a in the Guardian.

The truth is that nobody knows why Enron didn't cut it on Broadway. Maybe a play written and produced by Brits criticising the mismanagement that led to the collapse of an American energy company was too hard to swallow as BP tries to clean up the oil off the coast of Louisiana.

Or it could have been the New York Times wot dun it. Its theatre critic Ben Brantley gave the show , calling it "a flashy but labored economics lesson". The paper's opinion certainly carries a lot of weight. Perhaps the final straw was the play's failure to receive the nod for the Best Play short-list in the recently announced Tony Award nominations, which was seen by many as a vote of no confidence.

Much more fun, of course, is to go down the parochial route. "Oh, those Americans are so vulgar, they simply don't understand the nuances of a great work" and so on. Such protestations have embarrassment and humiliation at their heart, our taste being called into question by someone we desperately want to impress.

But for all the hand-wringing, head-scratching, OMG-how-could-they reaction, there is a silver lining to this dark theatrical cloud. At least the Western world's great streets of theatre - Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue - might be saved from the homogenisation that has made High Streets from Birmingham to Beijing look the same.

When I went to Beijing a couple of years ago, I was expecting nobody to speak English, food that contained things that would make a health and safety officer very angry and shops that emerged from houses as garages do in the wealthy West. The reality was that the have all but disappeared, replaced by characterless high-rises. And everybody seemed to speak English - to you, all the time, because they were all learning the language at once - and the High Street contained the same shops as you would find in London, New York and even Maidstone. The only difference was that their tourist shops sell over-priced flavoured teas and ours sell over-priced, over-sized postcards of faux punks with their breasts hanging out.

The great excitement of travel is to explore, appreciate and experience different cultures. One way to do this is through a country's arts: the festivals, literature, theatre and telly. Few things will give you a more undiluted, direct sense of the past, present and attitude to the future of the place you are visiting.

There has always been trading between London and New York when it comes to theatre: several American shows are running in London theatres at the moment and vice versa. But these have tended to be musicals or very showbizzy productions, less straight drama. That has started to change with producers now making announcements that commit a production to both London and New York before the show has opened anywhere. But something important would be lost if, in a few years' time, this trend grew to such an extent that the posters on theatre billboards on Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue were indistinguishable.

Anyway, what do the Americans know? They can't even spell "theatre".

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I heard some interesting points made by people in the art world yesterday while researching my about the Turner Prize short-list and its omission of any any artists in their 20s or 30s.

First, a senior member of London's art-world elite said that "looking at the new crop of young British artists is like watching the class system in action". There was a suggestion here that the prohibitive cost of courses and materials and the slim chances of later success mean that only people from wealthy backgrounds can afford to go to art college.

A related issue came up last week in conversation with the artist Michael Craig-Martin. He taught many of the famous YBAs while lecturing at Goldsmiths College but stopped when changes were made the status of art colleges. He said that previously, they had been more akin to old fashioned polytechnics - free to teach how they saw fit. University status, Craig-Martin said, came with stifling bureaucracy and a reductionist approach to teaching.

The second comment I want to share was this: "Young artists have moved on, but the Turner Prize jurors are looking in the same places."

"Moved on", in this context, means "moved away". I was told that many young British artists find London too expensive and have chosen to live elsewhere, such as India or South America. The implication here is that trawling the galleries of Hoxton and other areas previously ripe with artistic potential may not now be the most fruitful way of finding new talent in an age of globalisation.

Both these comments relate to finance and to the idea that opportunities to succeed as an emerging artist in Britain have receded. If this is the case, perhaps there is an opportunity for some of the publicly-funded arts institutions to help. They could consider looking at the subsidised theatre sector for inspiration.

The , the , the and other theatres run young writers' programmes. It doesn't matter if you haven't gone on a creative-writing course or even if you have an English GCSE; all you need is an aptitude for writing and a bit of determination. If, for example, an under-25 wannabe playwright sends a script that demonstrates some talent to the Royal Court, they will be invited on the programme. They don't need to give up their job, just most of their social life.

The rewards can be high. The Royal Court will work with the writer to help produce a script that might just make it to the stage. And in the case of recent successes such as Polly Stenhem (That Face), Laura Wade (Posh) or Lucy Prebble (Enron), this has helped to launch a high-profile career.

It's worth considering how this model might work at an institution like, say, the ICA, which lost its sponsor for Becks Futures a while ago. A gallery could run a Royal-Court-type Young Artists' Programme in concert with its curators, willing artists and a range of lecturers, with an annual show presenting the best of the work to the public and art world.

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The Turner Prize short-list has dropped into my inbox. It's a - sensible rather than shocking. At 40-plus, all the artists are old for first-time nominees. This age group is what the art world calls "mid-career"; the cut-off for eligibility is 49.

It's odd that a bunch of quadragenarians should make up the entirety of the short-list.

The blurb says that the purpose of the prize is to "promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art." What new development is any of this lot heralding?

49-year-old has been making uncanny paintings about famous locations of pop culture happenings for more than a decade. And 45-year-old first discovered her thing was to change the emphasis of a painting into an object when she broke the stretchers over her canvases while a student at the Slade School of Art.

True, the 40-something duo have only been around since 2002, but that is eight years ago and their schtick - futuristic essay films using archive footage - hasn't changed. Nor have the disembodied sound works of altered dramatically in direction or conceit over the years.

It's not that any of the artists are unworthy, only that they could have been chosen years ago when what they were doing was actually new. Of the last three winners of the Turner Prize, two were 49 - that bodes well for Dalwood. Taken with this year's short-list, it implies a trend.

Could it be that nowadays there is an element of "Buggins' Turn" about the whole thing? "Quick, give it to him" - it is almost always a bloke who wins; of the 25 previous winners, only three have been female - "before he's 50: he's much better than the youngsters; it just took us a while to realise." Or is it a sign that the age of the YBA and its aftermath has run out of steam - that the sub-40s no longer cut the mustard?

Or is the enfant terrible of the British art establishment turning itself into a nice annual mid-career group show for established artists? The Turner Prize in its current form - four artists under 50 who have had an exhibition during the previous 12 months - was devised back in the 1990s by the journalist and the director of Tate, Nicholas Serota after Channel 4 took over its sponsorship; at the time, Januszazak was a C4 arts commissioner.

For a while, Tate has been looking at ways to add a bit of spice, worried that the prize might be slipping out of fashion and might stop getting those precious column inches. A few years ago, with the help of the Gordon's Gin sponsorship, the prize money was increased substantially. The winner now receives £25,000 and each runner-up £5,000; previously, the losers received zilch. It was taken up to Liverpool as part of the city's Capital of Culture celebrations, which was a great success. Then Nick Serota decided to hand the chair over to the director of Tate Britain. As from last month, this is Penelope Curtis, the first female chair of the prize.

But the feeling remains that the prize is long due an overhaul: a change in the rules to make it international, maybe? Or perhaps let the public decide on the winner - a bad idea? The truth is that the Turner Prize is a victim of its time. We have been living in an age of relentless newness, the crack cocaine of a consumer society. The Turner embodies that insatiable desire for fresh ideas, the Next Big Thing, the life-affirming sense of being part of the zeitgeist.

Perhaps the truly radical approach would be to leave it alone: not to fiddle with the rules and principles at all, but simply to apply them more rigorously. is a British artist creating new and interesting work. He was born in 1976, making him some way short of his 40th birthday. He had a show in 2008 at the South London Gallery and another in Nice in 2009; in the last two years, he has been overlooked for the short-list.

Maybe the new shock tactic behind the Turner Prize is one of exclusion: to generate debate about who is not on the list. That would be a novel way of fulfilling its stated role to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art.

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