Spartacus Chetwynd, 'An Evening with Jabba the Hutt' (Courtesy the artist)

The Turner Prize, the prestigious award given to a British artist under 50 who put on the best exhibition in the last year, announced its short list. The artists are Lali "Spartacus" Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price.

Glasgow artist Luke Fowler's films generally handle accounts of people living on society’s fringe, like avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, with an impressionistic style composed of archival video clips, photographs and musical recordings.

Spartacus Chetwynd has transformed Milton's Paradise Lost and the book of Genesis into puppet plays. With her loose gang of 20 performance artists and friends, Ms. Chetwynd stages performances using found objects and hand-built costumes that are informed by Bertolt Brecht much as they are a children's nativity play. (Our colleague Andrew Russeth wrote about her Performa work last year.)

Elizabeth Price showed a fetishistic video at the last British Art Show, which consisted of a suggestively filmed selection of kitschy objects like a rotating egg whisk and a shiny LP set against remixed 80's pop.

Paul Noble is best known for his large graphite drawings of metaphorical cities is the creator of the book Nobson, Newtown (1998), a parody of a guidebook that features his drawings as illustrations.

The judges this year include Andrew Hunt of the Focal Point Gallery, Heike Munder from Zurich’s Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst and Michael Stanley of Modern Art Oxford.

Winners are announced Dec. 3.