Beck's Futures is the British art prize with the biggest money attached: £24,000 for the winner (this year, Rosalind Nashashibi), and £4000 each for the other eight artists.

Alan Currall's monologue to camera, Message to my Best Friend begins, 'I know it's really embarrassing but...you're my best friend', and gets funnier and funnier and more and more horribly embarrassing. But then what's embarrassing? The tone of sincerity is an act, of course. But the possibility of the genuine sincerity of such a speech - at least in the imagination - is what gives the piece a genuine and almost subversive pathos.

Performance art was always said to be about not acting. This kind of performance art - if that's what it is - is about whether self-effacement is fake or not, about whether sincerity is a performed thing. Identity, then. Doesn't the bible say, 'the heart is deceitful above all things'? David Sherry's video of the artist sewing balsa wood onto the soles of his feet has some of the same ambiguity about performing, and has an ironic resonance with performance art of the 60s and 70s. An absurdist domestic Actionism. In Sherry's wince-making endurance test is performed in an armchair with an admirable sang-froid which serves to deepen the irony and humour.

Currall also takes on death with hilarious results. Now that I'm in Heaven is a video will (we must suppose the artist dead). It opens, 'I know this must be a very difficult and emotionally stressful time for all of you...' and this awful assumption makes us laugh but also throws us into the terrible realisation of what matters in life. Did we love? Were we worth loving? 'You probably realise that I don't really have anything of any real value to leave to anybody.' And we laugh again. To Mandy (who gets most of what he owns), 'my Akai AM A1 amplifier. It's broken unfortunately but I think you might be able to get it mended...' Finally, eyes to camera, he says a plaintive 'goodbye', and the shot freezes. And we laugh.

So direct and easy and successful is Currall's work that one has the feeling here that it undermines the effect of some of the other art, which also uses more or less humorous, ironic and social strategies, and achieves its ends by presenting, documenting or revealing reality through one or other kinds of distorting glass. It is as though, while some are flailing around looking for meaning to in here in their work, he, opening a secret door, slips quietly down to the heart of things.

That said, Nashashibi is a worthy winner with her engaging social-realist films. She is unpretentious, interested in people, and while not much happens in her pieces, one senses immediately a certain weight. She shows the West Bank, America, Scotland. Some of the footage seems like stock video stuff: the child burning rubbish on waste ground, the guys getting haircuts (in the Sweet Love Saloon for Men), members of a club (remote-control aeroplane enthusiasts). But her filming is heartfelt, contemplative, fulsome. We are made to think about the meaning of ordinary and exotic, the fact we don't understand even our own cultures, and how strange or otherwise all 'ordinary' life looks on film.

The group Inventory is political. Their best piece here - and the least whimsical - is a documentary video about the English Americana Festival. Their script is good. The Confederate flag, they say, presents an inexplicable notion of independence and defiance strangely confused with the ideals of America's non-conformist Protestant founders, and further with guns and racism. This piece has something to say, and says it straight, while around it are pieces by other artists with some of the artists trying too hard to be themselves, to transcend their influences.

Francis Upritchard does cod archaeology and has had the energy, for what it's worth, to tear up the gallery floorboards in order to present her miniature archaeological dig, complete with miniature moaning mummy. And one can't help liking someone who (in an annotated drawing of the British coat of arms) presents Prince Charles as the Antichrist. All of which is fine as far as it goes.

Bernd Behr joins the line of artists who have rehashed Klein's Leap into the Void, by videoing himself clumsily climbing onto the original wall. Cut. Loop. A bit of designer art abjection. Better is the video of an office in which the lights go off one by one, and then come on again. But the equation he makes between architecture and bodily functions isn't clear enough: one has to read the literature to be able to see this. Besides, how interesting is this idea?

The work of Carey Young has almost nothing to recommend it except that it has brought to light, through reports in newspapers and art magazines, a more interesting artist, the Swedish Anna Livia Löwendahl-Atomic, who has complained of plagiarism. The charge may or may not be unfair but her piece 'A Selection of Interesting Secrets in my Life' has a beautiful conceptual shape which Carey's stab at conceptualism simply doesn't. It also has a frisson, a sense of mischief. Löwendahl-Atomic sells her secrets one by one, the buyer having to sign a non-disclosure agreement to the effect that he or she can never reveal the secret to anyone. Young has made the exhibition sponsor sign an agreement not to tell about an art work by her which only he has seen. Elsewhere, a video shows the artist rehearsing a line with a self-confidence trainer ('My name is Carey Young and I am a revolutionary'). Both the humour and the seriousness of this fall flat. A slide-projector sequence has her pacing to and fro amidst a flow of commuters on the street. This is about more than its stated homage to Richard Long, but it still doesn't add up to much.

One often wonders if the art matches the gallery literature about it.Which points up a deeper problem: should an artwork be self-explanatory, or can it rely on the written word to assist it in its effect? Of course it can, but awareness and control of the factors making up the artwork as a whole is the thing. One sometimes senses a disjunction between a piece as presented and the story pertaining to it which is the result of too lazily thinking out a piece, and then turning it, in too perfunctory a manner, into an artwork. In this regard I liked Lucy Skaer's work. She shows piles of photo-posters, to be taken away by viewers: two chrysalids in the palm of a hand, a scorpion and a diamond, a Rorschach blot drawn on the ground with red wine. The chrysalids she hid in the Old Bailey, London's chief criminal court. The scorpion and diamond she left on a street. I don't know about the blot. The point however is that her photos are lucid about their own mystery: their provenance and their connection to some unseen artistic action may be unknown, but we can see that such a mystery exists. Coherence is all.

Nick Crowe's web site, www.the-world-wars.co.uk, I have been unable, for reasons technical and not technical, unable to access, My apologies to him and to everyone. It sounds great in the literature. You have the address.

ICA London, 05-04-03 - 18-05-03 CCA Glasgow, 07-06-03 - 27-07-03 Southampton City Art Gallery, 25-09-03 - 30-11-03