Birkenhead, UK–born artist Mark Leckey, professor of film studies at Frankfurt's Städelschule, has won the 2008 Turner Prize, The Guardian’s Mark Brown reports. Leckey was presented with the prize and its attendant thirty-seven-thousand-dollar check by Nick Cave at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London. For a prize that has thrived on outraged headlines, Brown notes that the most controversial thing about this year’s Turner Prize was its lack of controversy. Leckey was the only man on a list that also included artists Goshka Macuga, Cathy Wilkes, and Runa Islam. Leckey joins a list of previous winners that includes artists such as Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, and Antony Gormley.

The forty-three-year-old, London-based artist rifles popular culture at will to create his own works. His piece Cinema-in-the-Round shows the artist lecturing in a deadpan voice on the nature of the filmed image in popular culture, referencing everything from Georg Baselitz, James Cameron, and Felix the Cat to the episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes out into the human world. Another of his works in the exhibition is Made in ’Eaven, in which Leckey appears to have re-created Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in Leckey’s own flat.

The panel of judges was chaired by Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar and included architect David Adjaye; Suzanne Cotter, curator of Modern Art Oxford; Frieze editor Jennifer Higgie; and Daniel Birnbaum, director of the academy where Leckey teaches. The Tate has stressed that the winning choice was a group decision. In a statement it said: “Both the Turner prize 2008 jury and Tate were made aware at the shortlist meeting that Daniel Birnbaum is director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Frankfurt and that Mark Leckey is a part-time professor of film studies at the art school, currently on sabbatical. The shortlist and the winner of the prize is decided collectively through a series of discussions until the jury arrives at a consensus.”