Turner Prize heads for record crowds in Gateshead

Queues of people wanting to get in to see this year's Turner Prize exhibition were stretching all the way from the Baltic gallery entrance to the Millennium Bridge. Over 28,000 people have already packed in to see the show, which opened to the public last Friday and is on until January. Godfrey Worsdale, the still relatively new director of Baltic, who has succeeded in turning the gallery's fortunes around after its somewhat rickety early years, is delighted with the numbers. He says: It's absolutely tremendous to see such enthusiasm for this exhibition. The Turner Prize has always been a show that everyone wants to talk about but here in the North East it seems to be a show that everyone wants to see as well While the early enthusiasm is unlikely to be maintained throughout the exhibition's run, it's quite possible that this will be the most visited Turner Prize exhibition ever. Over the last 10 years, attendance at the show has averaged around 80,000. When the prize was shown at Tate Liverpool in 2007 - the only previous occasion it has not been at Tate Britain - it was also free and attracted 71,800 visitors. That was estimated to have provided a fillip of £1.5m to the local economy. It seems very unlikely that visitor numbers to the Turner Prize show at Baltic this year will be much under 120,000, and quite possibly far more, so the boost to Gateshead-Newcastle should be even greater. Some 5% of Baltic's visitors come from overseas, and 35% from outside the North East, with the remainder made up of the increasingly numerous local art lovers. A few years ago the London Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell complained bitterly that the CoBrA exhibition at the Baltic was not going to be shown in London. He's less likely to worry about missing a Turner Prize exhibition, but everybody else who wants to see it will have to make the trip, as it's not going to be shown in London this year. The nearly 5,000 visitors a day are seeing work by four artists - George Shaw, a painter, Karla Black, an installation artist, sculptor Martin Boyce and Hilary Lloyd, a film and video-maker - one of whom will win the £25,000 prize at a ceremony at the Baltic on December 5th . The exhibition continues until January the 8th.