“Ars Fennica,” now at Scandinavia House, is Finland’s answer to Britain’s Turner Prize, considered the most prestigious contemporary visual arts award. It is bestowed annually by the Ars Fennica Foundation, established in 1990 by entrepreneur Pertti Niemistö and his wife Henna. The couple were double-barreled collectors of contemporary art and lavish promoters. (Pertti died in 1999, Henna in 2004.)

Despite squeaks and whistles about “encouraging artists in their creativity,” the prize was explicitly created to secure international contacts for the Finnish art world. “Ars Fennica” is best viewed as a marketing event that is stage-managed as a cultural one and couched in the rhetoric of connoisseurship.

The Turner Prize is supported by Tate Modern and Channel 4, Britain’s major network. “Ars Fennica” is backed by the newly minted prestige of the Hämeenlinna Art Museum (a historic brewery renovated to house the Niemistö collection) and covered by MTV-3, Finland’s prime network. The short list for the Turner Prize was set at four artists in order to fit comfortably into an hour-long television profile of the candidates. “Ars Fennica” follows suit.

The award includes a monetary prize of 34,000 euros, or nearly $50,000, an impressive catalog with commissioned encomiums, and an exhibition tour of three Finnish art museums (not to mention a debut in New York). While cash is nice, the tour is the true prize for both artists and collectors: The market value of the work bumps up at each stop — an invitation to speculative buyers. In its way, “Ars Fennica” is an art world version of an initial public offering. Scandinavia House is the last stop on the itinerary.

On view are the 2007 finalists: photographer and video artist Elina Brotherus, sculptor Markus Kåhre, and painters Elina Merenmies and Anna Tuori. The winner, Mr. Kåhre, was chosen by dealer Glenn Scott Wright, co-director of Victoria Miro Gallery, a London pacemaker.

Ms. Brotherus is the only artist who brings a northern inflection to the exhibition. She photographs land’s end, a compelling sight in Finland’s extreme latitude. But her tongue-in-cheek effort to mimic painting conventions constricts the emotional weight of her subject. Titles like “Low Horizon Line” or “Very Low Horizon Line” shift attention from the stark Finnish terrain to her own ironic detachment. With the line of a running fence offered as an equal horizon, the scene loses its dread. When the artist places herself, with her back to the viewer, against primal vistas, the work fades into a pale, mocking impression of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (1818).

“Baigneurs” is her three-screen video of young people skinny-dipping in Finnish lakes. She films them in the spirit of dorm-mates taking pictures of each other in the shower. Frontal nudity is cheerfully offered as a local delicacy.

Ms. Merenmies blots and smudges ink drawings of trees into hallucinatory forest-scapes. Hansel and Gretel and rings of faerie folk might have rambled in the same haunted brushwood. Her results are less felicitous, however, when she applies similar techniques to faces, many of them taken from historical masterworks. Blotches, dots, stains, and smears disfigure her sources with trendy welts, weals, scabs, and scars — more Stephen King than Francis Bacon. The gallery’s presentation minimizes the extent of her flirtation with grotesque stylelessness. Ms. Merenmies risks dissolving a refined talent in the acid of fashionable shock.

Ms. Tuori’s adolescent gothicism is surprisingly amateurish. Her “Perilous Realm” looks, at first, like a tub of melting Häagen-Dazs. But trolls lurk in the vanilla swirl. Nihilism is the flavor du jour; there is a canker on every birch. Ms. Tuori’s world, “joyfully out of joint and darkly warped,” is said to bypass “the unilateral rules of puritan morality.” The posture sounds just right for television. Bad painting and worse drawing can be politely skirted except when they are offered as the pride of a nation. Mr. Kåhre delivers art that, in the publicist’s blurb, consigns “materiality” to the background. Put plainly, this means art made more for the purpose of being reported on than looked at. What you see are a few hooks for press agentry: the obligatory video, an installation that hinges on a mirror planed to reject your reflection, and tastefully crafted pseudoscientific whatnots.

One piece, however, slips the conceptual noose and delights. A motorized, simulated millstone is inscribed with a simple man-shape repeated around a central deposit of loose sand. It revolves like a perpetually turning hourglass, figures filling and emptying with each revolution. Mesmerizing.

My paternal grandmother was a Lutheran farm girl from rural Sweden. So I look to Scandinavia House for some whisper of regional character, something that touches the nerve center of Nordic sensibilities. “Ars Fennica” is a tutorial in just how quixotic my expectations are. The synthetic folklore of contemporary image-making routs any hint of the ancestral soul.

Until April 12 (58 Park Ave. at 38th Street, 212-879-9779).