Turner Prize 2016 (Tate Britain, 27 September-2 January 2017)

One of the benefits of having Tate Membership is that you can go to the Turner Prize show and not feel you’ve wasted money on it.

Unless George Shaw is shortlisted, when it’s worth it.

Of course, the winner has been announced, but I didn’t get my ass in gear before that to post any commentary. I’d probably been to a couple of other exhibitions first, so I might have been arted-out.

This year there were four artists nominated, beginning with Helen Marten who had also won the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture and rather sweetly divided the prize between everyone on the shortlist. [Wouldn’t it be fun if a painter like Frank Auerbach won for sculpting so much paint onto a canvas?] I guess her work is a series of ready mades, sculptures put together from found objects, a mad set of Airfix kits put together with the wrong pieces but the right instructions. I’m kind of meh with this, distinctly underwhelmed, and was ready to move onto …

Anthea Hamilton, who is channelling Antonin Artaud and his theatrical images and the Theatre of Cruelty. We have fake bricks on the wall in half of the room — Tate does Colouroll? — and the blue but cloudy London sky in the other. A large golden arse divides the room — Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce) — and then a series of pant shapes hanging, like washing, on chains from the roof. There’s a suit of brick coloured material. It’s funny, it’s cheeky (did you see what I did there?), it rips off René Magritte and it deserves to win.

Josephine Pryde is also fun — creating photos from kitchen worktops using chemicals and camera-less exposure. On the other walls are photos, often involving hands or slogans, or phones, a kind of anti-fashion shoot, Hands “Fur Mich”, which were clearly worth a peruse. In the centre of the room is a Class 66 diesel train scale model, The New Media Express in a Temporary Siding (Baby Wants to Ride), which indeed could be ridden in other versions of the show and here couldn’t even be sat on. I think she’s the one who should win.

Finally, Michael Dean, the token man, whose room is dominated by (United Kingdom poverty line for two adults and children: twenty thousand four hundred and thirty six pounds sterling as published on 1st September 2016), a pile of pennies equivalent to the amount the government believes a family of four can live on, minus a penny. Shades of Mr McCawber. This was the most evidently political piece, but in a classic case of more is less, the surrounding sculptures of surreal body parts and faked shipping posters just get in the way. Meh.

And the winner was — Marten, who again split the prize. As I’ve said, not my choice of winner, and not the piece I felt was the best art, but there you go.

Next year, the Prize will be in Hull. I can’t wait. And no, that isn’t snark.