But what do the critics have to say about nominees Tomma Abts, Phil Collins, Mark Titchner and Rebecca Warren?

Here is a round-up of some of the press reaction to the exhibition.

Tomma Abts was nominated for "intimate and compelling canvases"

If not for the exhibition labels, visitors to Tate Britain's latest show would never know that the nondescript office tucked away at the rear of a series of galleries was a work of art.

Nor would they realise that a cherry stone, a dirty cotton-wool ball and other bits of debris in a display case were a sculpture.

But these are exhibits in the Turner Prize 2006 exhibition, and curators are once again courting controversy.

Installations by Rebecca Warren include rubbish found on her floor

There are already plenty of people out there who think modern art is a load of rubbish.

And here's one artist who seems determined to prove it really is a waste.

Turner Prize contender Rebecca Warren has filled five display cases with dross she found on her studio floor and the road outside.

Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas declared: "They have emotional and associative resonance, and can communicate meaning."

Let's hope that's cleared things up for those of you who actually thought it was just a pile of litter.

Mark Titchner creates paintings, light boxes and animations

Warren's clay sculpture explodes out of, then merges back into, the amorphous properties of the material.

That's why it looks all lumpy.

Tate spin doctors say artist Mark Titchner uses "optical illusion to emphasise the fragility of our senses".

I should have gone to Specsavers.

The best I can say about Titchner's work is that it looks bizarre.

It's all too clever by half, I keep thinking: too many complications, too much self-conscious eccentricity.

Why must Warren always make a joke out of her sculptures? The more I am meant to pick up the references in Warren's art... the less interested I become. There's too much rhetoric.

[Tomma] Abts and [Phil] Collins are the most developed in my view. They ought to win.

Artist Phil Collins has produced the first ever "live" Turner Prize exhibit

The biggest talking point is likely to be generated by a work that could have been crafted by Harold Pinter for the theatre.

A large room looking exactly like an office in which three or four people will sit and work, answering phones, tapping into computers, every weekday until 14 January between 10am and 6pm.

Was this art? Yes, definitely, because the artist said so, explained Katherine Stout, one of the curators.