Home is where the art is

ONCE it housed a team of bookmakers, feverishly working to adjust the odds in the build up to a race. Now, it is an altogether calmer space. Clean white walls, a large, rectangular white table to one side, minimalist furniture in chrome and white.

Three glass cabinets hang on the walls. Two of them house champagne bottles, one surrounded by six glasses and the other by two, with each glass served by a pipe coming out of the bottle.

The other cabinet contains three metal contraptions which turn out to be seats used for watching horse racing, complete with dozens of attachments, to be fixed to the legs depending on the surface of the course. Spikes for soft grass, rounded ends for grit, and barbs containing poison where ants are a problem.

The contents of the cabinets turn out to be art. Practical, and the seats were brought into use for one racing party, but art nonetheless. And this is entirely appropriate, for the room, on the top floor of the House of Approximate Odds at Catterick Racecourse, is the workplace of Greville Worthington, contemporary art enthusiast and one of the judges for this year's Turner Prize.

The 1930s red-brick building in the centre of the course was due to be demolished until Greville stepped in to save it and convert it into the office from which he runs the Sunday market at the racecourse, itself owned by his mother Valerie.

But as well as his day job, for more than 20 years the 38-year-old father of three has been appreciating, studying and collecting modern art. He is a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation, the largest private donator of cash for art, and of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. Last year, he was selected to represent the Patrons of New Art, which founded the Turner Prize, as their representative on the jury for this year's award.

'I suppose I was chosen because I'm a neutral person in the world of contemporary art. I'm someone who is interested in contemporary art without dealing in it," he says. "I think it is an honour to be asked. It is something I felt I could give the time to, and I had absolutely no reason not to do it, so I did it."

The last year has seen him visit 56 individual exhibitions all over the country. Each of the four judges were then able to put forward six names, before meeting to produce a shortlist of four from the 24 possible. They will meet again at the end of the year to decide the winner of the £20,000 prize, following an exhibition of all four shortlisted artists at Tate Modern.

"I was amazed at the amount of talent about, the very interesting exhibitions and the amount of divergent strategies for making art these days. There is an enormous amount of art being done at the moment - there has been an absolute explosion in the amount of art, aided by the Lottery and the number of museums. This is a very fruitful time for artists," he says.

The Turner Prize regularly throws up controversy. In 1995, Damien Hirst won with his sheep and cows pickled in formaldehyde, and, three years later, Chris Ofili's paintings in elephant dung took the honours.

Last year, Martin Creed won with his The Lights Going On and Off, which featured an empty room where the lights went on and off, although Madonna created as much of a sensation when she presented the prize by swearing on live television.

This year's shortlist includes a recording of an artist reading the plot of a pornographic film, lead casts of the contents of a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu, installations made out of Plexiglass and photographs of toilets and hospital corridors.

The shortlist has already stirred up the usual debate over whether some of it can be counted as art at all, a debate which is bound to intensify as the December prize-giving draws nearer. But Greville has little time for such snipings.

"An artwork is something that an artist says is an artwork, that will do for me. Anyone can say anything is an artwork and call themselves an artist, there is no problem with that. You can say you are an artist and declare that cup of coffee is an artwork," he says pointing to the cup, white of course, in front of me, "and that is fine by me."

But my elevation to the status of artist is cut short by his next sentence.

"But there has got to be a system of accounting for this. One looks at the career of an artist and finds out whether they are serious and long-term and committed and engaged in the activities of being an artist, and that is what they do, and that their work is thought out and reasoned and the result of their engagement with their subject matter."

Although he is never less than affable, a slight note of irritation slips into his voice as he responds to repeated prodding with the 'But is it art?' question, a question which, to be fair, he must have faced hundreds of times.

'It is extremely easy to write it off for people who aren't involved in it, by people who say 'I don't know anything about it but I know that is a load of rubbish,' and that is fine," he says. "I'm not standing up and being combative about this - everyone must decide what are their interests in life and whether to involve themselves or not in art.

"The first thing you say to people who say 'That is a load of rubbish', is have they looked around it and studied it and engaged with it? And most of the time they haven't. And if they have, that is the basis of a really interesting discussion.

"Art can be anything provided the artist says it is. You can get into the debate of whether it is interesting or not, and that is more interesting than whether it is art. That is very stale."

Suitably humbled, I retreat onto the safer ground of the origin of his interest in contemporary art, which seemed to bloom from nothing when he went to Edinburgh University to study geography in 1982.

"I went straight from school and didn't really know anything about art. There were certain key moments that I remember as being pretty interesting, and meeting certain people and seeing certain things and certain situations, that made me realise how interesting the modern world was.

"There was a gallery, the Fruitmarket Gallery, which was showing work from America I had never seen before and never thought art could be like this. My perception of what art was radically changed," he says.

The result of this revelation has been the creation of a sizeable collection of contemporary art, some of it on display at his home just minutes from the racecourse, but much of it in storage. It obviously covers a wide range of media, although painting does not figure largely - and not for the first time painting has no place on the Turner shortlist.

He also has a huge library of books about art - "I have spent all my pocket money buying books", he says - but has never formally studied art, preferring to keep it as an interest.

"I'm interested in everything - nature, people, books, poetry, art, and I collect bamboos. All these things are just processes of being alive, and the art object is a way of referencing that experience. Art is a provocative response to being alive."

And although he sees the Turner Prize as a way of stimulating debate about contemporary art, and increasing the audience, he is quite relaxed if other people choose not to take an interest. Everyone has their own opinion, and if some choose to dismiss his interest, that is up to them.

"I don't find it at all frustrating. I don't see it as any different from people seeing my collection of bamboos and saying 'that is rubbish, they just look like weeds'," he says. "It is a free world. Everyone can be interested in what they're interested in.

"I'm not particularly interested in motor cars, I'm not at all interested in football." He may not be interested in football, but he is wearing an England tracksuit top. "I bought it at the Catterick Sunday market," he grins, as he gets back to his day job.