Editorial: A Turner Prize to confound the sceptics

What a shame it is that the Turner Prize was not, in the end, awarded to the man who paints with excrement or the woman who lives in a nudist colony and changed her name to Spartacus so as to "remind people they have a choice in life". Instead, the winner of the prestigious modern art prize was Elizabeth Price, whose trilogy of video installations draws from film and photographic archives and historic artefacts to generate fantasy episodes.

To many people, the Turner Prize is beyond parody – an incomprehensible homage to pickled sharks and unmade beds. There was, however, more obvious skill and depth to this year's offerings.

Ms Price's 20-minute piece, centred on a fatal fire in a branch of Woolworths in 1979, is widely held to be both poetic and profound. At least the Turner is continuing to confound stereotypes.