Forgive me if I find myself unable to align myself fully with either of these camps.

Yes, this year’s outcome has a whiff of “all must have prizes.” But I admire these artists’ cunning in twisting the rules of the Turner Prize for their own purposes — which continues a notable uptick in recent years of participants refusing to kowtow to institutions, roughing up their precedents and speaking out against their administration.

The Turner, first awarded in 1984, truly gained prominence in the 1990s, during those now mercifully forgotten days of “Cool Britannia.” At schools like Goldsmiths and the Glasgow School of Art, and in magazines like Frieze and Afterall, British art was throwing off its old insularity. The Tate Gallery was preparing to move its modern programming into a huge power station south of the River Thames, and its annual prize was establishing what would almost become a new academy.

The Turner Prize, awarded live on the BBC after a monthslong exhibition of the nominees, helped establish the public reputations of Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Chris Ofili and (it was the ’90s) Damien Hirst — their notoriety helped along by Britain’s squalid tabloid press, which annually proclaimed that contemporary art was a sucker’s game. (The high point came in 2001, when Martin Creed took the prize for his self-descriptive installation “The Lights Going On and Off.”)

The award became so visible that it spawned a number of continental imitators. Both the Prix Marcel Duchamp in France and the Preis der Nationalgalerie in Germany were responses to the Turner’s success.