I admire Abts for persisting with her pictures. I admire her for exploring the subtlest hinterlands of her artform rather than opting for the easy way out and adopting some retro-aesthetic. That particular loophole has been too well tried and tested of late. Irony and kitsch have become far too familiar.

But that doesn’t mean I want to stand in front of Abts’s timid images. Few would want to spend time in her hermetic world. It is a land for artistic anoraks. It may have a certain obsessive fascination for insiders — and the sort of inscrutable commentators that contribute to the Tate’s Turner leaflet — but it lacks the spark that ignites the public soul.

The Turner purports to reflect the state of the contemporary art scene. If so, then this year’s shortlist suggests that out there in the warehouses and studios of Britain things are looking pretty uninspiring. That’s hardly surprising. We have recently emerged from a Brit-art-boosted era. Whether you loved it or loathed it, it was successful.

And how can artistic fashion be expected to find a new direction? It can’t turn on a ha’penny — or, even a £25,000 cheque. New talents are not turned up annually. They barely come round more than a few times a century. And now the Turner, it seems, has nowhere to turn except inwards. It has got trapped in a relentlessly narrowing loop.

And yet, until now, this prize still served a purpose: it has got people talking; it has stirred debate. But this year’s shortlist has signally failed, rousing nothing but intense indifference.

The judges would have made a far stronger statement if they had declared that they were not going to award the prize; that there was nothing new that merited attention. That would get people talking about the contemporary art scene in a way that Tomma Abts meticulous little canvases never will.

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