Turner Prize: winner Elizabeth Price is cutting edge but not controversial This year's Turner Prize has gone to the artist who is in most respects the most difficult and the most on the cutting edge of now, and yet is at the same time the least controversial. For the third year in a row, the judges had the opportunity to endorse an artist who, while far from traditional in style and approach, works with time-honoured materials, making things you can actually hang on the wall. Two years ago it was Dexter Dalwood's quizzical contemporary history paintings. Last year it was George Shaw's miserabilist Coventry council estate daubings. This year Paul Noble's large-scale but minutely realised fantasy pencil drawings were the bookie's favourite to win. Again the judges failed to go for the popular choice, perhaps understandably. While Noble's drawings, set in a fictional postwar housing development called Nobson Newtown, which he has been depicting for 20 years, are technically highly proficient and often witty, they seem to exist in an intelligently whimsical category of their own. It's difficult to see that they say much about where art is or should be going - which is surely one of the functions of the award. If critical and popular taste was united on one issue this year, it was that Spartacus Chetwynd couldn't and shouldn't win. Her carnivalesque faux rituals - with gangling, mud-stained youths dressed as mandrake roots forcing gallery-goers to listen to the predictions of a slightly sinister stuffed rabbit - were described as shambolically amateurish even by people who liked them. Perhaps the amateurishness was the point - but to what end? I'm relieved that Luke Fowler didn't win: not because his 93-minute film on the still controversial anti-psychiatrist RD Liang isn't interesting - from the human interest point of view it's the most compelling work in the exhibition - but because it is 93 minutes long. Even ten years ago, Fowler's enigmatic, free-form explorations of archive material would have been considered alternative cinema and shown in cinemas. Now they are called art and while they are welcome on the fringes of the gallery experience, if this is what the art of the future is going to be about - sitting endlessly in what is effectively a cinema - why don't we just go to the cinema? This year's winner, Elizabeth Price, also works on video with found footage, but in a far more compressed and abstract way that feels more part of the fine-art than the cinematic tradition. Her 20-minute film The Woolworths Choir of 1979 starts out as a kind of sophisticated PowerPoint presentation on medieval church architecture, syncopated to a clapping beat. It develops the idea of the choir into a kind of blurry girl group video, before incorporating footage of a fire in a Woolworths store in 1979, in which ten people died. To say that these three sections don't connect would be an understatement: the idea that "choir" rhymes with "fire" seems to have been thrown in largely to infuriate the viewer. Yet the way these elements are forced together, against just about any logic, is challenging and intriguing. The use of rhythm and texture to create a haunting sense of disquiet is brilliantly done. As with other films I've seen by Price, there is the sense of something slightly arid, academic and a little too clever for its own sake about the work. Yet it is the work of a genuinely interesting talent, who finally was the only realistic winner for this year's Turner Prize.