Old schooled

OPINIONS about art are commonly prefaced with the disclaimer that the speaker doesn't know anything about the matter.

OPINIONS about art are commonly prefaced with the disclaimer that the speaker doesn't know anything about the matter, even when this is not followed by the conversation-closing declaration that they know what they like.

What this implies, of course, is that art is a specialised field in which expertise counts for more than common sense but, like most such assumptions, it is a very questionable one.

There are fields in which common sense must indeed yield to scientific knowledge, such as chemistry or astronomy, but there are others, such as ethics, in which the instinct of the ordinary person is often more reliable than the theories of supposed experts. That spontaneous instinct, however, is never pure, but may be trained and refined by one cultural environment or brutalised and corrupted by another.

Discrimination in art is fostered or corrupted in the same way. Most people will instinctively admire work that is beautifully done, although at first they may confuse facility with real skill. Someone unfamiliar with music will perhaps admire Andrew Lloyd Webber or find his music easier than Schubert, for example; but a little experience and education of the ear will show them that the former is sentimental kitsch and the latter is rich, complex and moving.

People who naturally respond to art need the same education, but they usually get the opposite. Thus volunteer guides at the big state galleries are generally people with some natural taste and discrimination. They are spontaneously inclined to see that certain things, such as the work of Gilbert and George, are fake and pretentious even if they may think that some other things are better than they are. But instead of education, they are exposed to diseducation; they are told that Gilbert and George are important, and then in turn they repeat this to groups of schoolchildren, whose own curriculum is almost entirely misleading anyway.

The result of all this is a polarisation typical of contemporary consumer society and significantly different from earlier periods. In the past, the rich may have paid for the art that was made, but the work itself was widely accessible and, indeed, addressed to a broad public. The making of art was a specialised activity, but paintings and sculptures were readily appreciated by non-specialists. Today, art is paradoxically assumed not to require specialist skill and yet increasingly addresses a limited and quasi-professional public: the people of the art world and patrons who are flattered to be included in this chosen company.

The divide is epitomised in the contrast between the winner of this year's Archibald prize and the winner of the packing room prize, chosen by the workers who hang the show. The packers nominated Vincent Fantauzzo's portrait of Matt Moran, wielding a cleaver and surrounded by carcasses; the trustees decided in favour of Ben Quilty's Margaret Olley.

If you are uncertain whether you understand anything about painting, you need only look at the portrait of Moran as a touchstone; if you think this is a good picture, the answer is in the negative. But if you like Quilty, the diagnosis is unfortunately not a lot more hopeful. The picture has a degree of painterly abstraction that would be unpalatable to those who like the shiny Fantauzzo product, but the whole effect is vulgar, meretricious and gimmicky.

The problem with both, as I have already mentioned in my detailed preview of the finalists and discussion of the winner, is an excessive reliance on photography, and this is a fundamental issue that the trustees should consider before next year's prize, not only if they want to raise the mediocre standard of the exhibition, but even if they have any interest in complying with the spirit of the bequest.

In 1975, John Bloomfield was stripped of the Archibald when it was revealed that his portrait of Tim Burstall was based on a photograph. Today, after several years of unsuccessful litigation by Bloomfield, both the sitter and the painter have to sign a declaration that the work was done from life. It is all too apparent from the works in the show, however, that this is in many cases all but an outright lie.

What, I wonder, is the minimum that both parties feel they have to do to sign in good faith? Have an initial sitting, followed by working from photographs and a final sitting to finish the picture? Or do they simply meet, take some photographs and perhaps do a thumbnail sketch? Or do they even dispense with that?

The trouble with photographs is that they don't give enough information about either the physical or the psychological presence of the sitter. Blatant errors in several pictures reveal that the painter was copying photos without an understanding of the three-dimensional, sculptural nature of the body before him. But psychologically, too, a portrait is a synthesis of the sitter's character and being as encountered through time by the artist; one of the most repellent things about Fantauzzo's work is the way he seizes on a momentary grimace and painstakingly copies it.

Of course, the other thing the trustees could do to improve the Archibald would be simply not to hang any head that was more than twice life-size. There is never any excuse for pictorial macrocephaly, which is only a kind of freak or mutant that has developed in the special environment of the Archibald itself. The good news, as I have already mentioned, is that there are more reasonable pictures, ranging from half to 1 1/2 times life size, in this year's exhibition, and this may be a hopeful sign for the future.

Of the other two exhibitions, the Wynne includes a number of landscapes that show potential, although none that is completely satisfactory. There are some lessons to be learned for artists who want to do better. Neil Frazer's massive two-panel landscape reminds me of a friend's description of Maurice Vlaminck as a thug with a palette knife. This kind of massive scale and gross execution is another unfortunate adaptation to the distorting conditions of art prizes and the drive to be noticed in the crowd.

Next to it is an incomparably better picture by Philip Wolfhagen, but it is again gratuitously oversized and lacking in compositional structure to support the sensibility expressed in tone and colour. Paul Ryan's work too is massive and heavy handed, destroying any chance of expressing the subject he has chosen; the result is merely raucous.

Tony Flint's rusted car bodies in a cascade are misconceived as well as too big and lacking in painterly interest. A landscape is not a poster for conservation and we don't need to have the obvious preached to us. Scott McDougall's urban landscape could have potential, but his buildings lack compositional structure and the theme is too obvious, so that there is no room for the play of the imagination.

Andrew Browne's work, as I have noted before, has some appealing qualities, but it remains too cool and contrived, too designer, as though consciously intended to hang in an architect's waiting room. He should stop pursuing a safely contemporary look and take more real aesthetic risks.

Perhaps the best landscape in the exhibition is A. J. Taylor's Winter Rain, Hawkesbury River, a modestly scaled picture whose tall vertical format recalls some of the Heidelberg artists. Taylor works over a rather eccentric underpainting of coloured squiggles, but the picture captures a sense of the life, movement and interrelatedness of the place and moment he has chosen to represent.

Perhaps unable to choose between the landscapes, the judges turned to the sculptures, the other category covered by the Wynne. And this year they awarded the prize to a work by Richard Goodwin, on whose early work I wrote a book many years ago. Here, Goodwin has strikingly set a shiny new motorbike on its end on the back of a shabby Chinese tricycle cart; the piece reminds me of a Chinese merchant I once saw selling electronic calculators, but working out the discount he would offer on an abacus.

As for the Sulman, it is once again a kind of junk-heap of pictures in which the breathtakingly awful and the ludicrously tendentious jostle with the merely amateurish, while some of the usual suspects are there doing their predictably tiresome thing, such as the ever self-promoting Kate Beynon, who is also in the Archibald.

This dreadful exhibition was selected by an artist called Richard Bell for reasons best known to the director of the gallery, who proposed him, and the trustees, who appointed him. Bell has since admitted that he chose a lot of the pictures because they included animals, which helps to explain some of the shockers, and that he selected the winner by tossing a coin on to eight pieces of paper on which he had written the names of artists he either liked or disliked.

The winner, Peter Smeeth, understandably feels let down to learn that he won in part at least by chance, especially given the work's subject. The Artist's Fate shows a one-armed man, presumably the artist himself, disembowelled and castrated by two demonic figures and about to be carried off by the personification of death, while the three-headed hound of hell, Cerberus, threatens him in the foreground. I suppose the demonic figures must allude to critics, but I had no recollection of Smeeth's work until I looked back through the files and found that he had done a very bad portrait of Peter FitzSimons last year, in which the lack of composition and anatomical inaccuracy betrayed a reliance on photography. Smeeth would be better advised to learn from critical responses to his mistakes than to resort to hyperbolic expressions of self-pity.

One of the distressing things about the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman shows is that they attract a very large audience of the general public, people who don't usually attend art exhibitions but who incomprehensibly, in my view, actually pay money to see this one. To such an audience, the fact of being exhibited at the state gallery invests the pictures with authority and plausibility.

Just as the behaviour people see in mainstream films modifies what they consider normal or acceptable in real life, the art they see in officially sanctioned exhibitions alters their sense of what is aesthetically acceptable. That is why it is painful to see unsophisticated viewers and their children inspecting ugly and stupid pictures in the Sulman, earnestly trying to understand why they are considered good. Instead of educating these audiences, such exhibitions contribute to corrupting their judgment.

Archibald, Sulman and Wynne Prizes, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until June 26