Why I quit the Blake Prize jury

ADAM Cullen thinks I find his work shocking and that I resigned from the Blake Prize judging panel because the other two judges voted to include his picture of a "Jew on the cross", as he so sensitively puts it.

Adam Cullen's Blake Prize entry 'takes ugliness to the point of provocation'

ADAM Cullen thinks I find his work shocking and that I resigned from the Blake Prize judging panel because the other two judges voted to include his picture of a "Jew on the cross", as he so sensitively puts it.

Actually, neither of these suggestions is quite true.

Cullen submitted his painting of the crucifixion, with the inscription "Only woman bleed", to the annual prize for religious art. I don't find his paintings shocking so much as clumsy and boring; but what is worse is that, perhaps making a virtue of necessity, he deliberately takes ugliness to the point of provocation. It becomes a gimmick to draw attention to what otherwise would have no claim on our interest at all.

This is a kind of aesthetic bluff that I find profoundly distasteful.

It is based on the fallacious but common assumption that ugliness must be akin to truth.

As for the Blake Prize, what I found really intolerable in the end was a rather serious procedural irregularity. Last Friday the judges met and, after hours of looking through PowerPoints of several hundred images (already a short list), we settled on about 75 works to be hung in the show. Cullen's picture was voted out. We paused for lunch and reviewed the list. It was settled.

But then overnight one of the judges, who had previously declared Cullen's work offensive, had a change of heart; a little conversion on the road to Damascus, if you will. By Saturday morning Cullen's work was deeply spiritual. By Saturday afternoon, the chairman of the Blake, Rod Pattenden, chose to accept this as a change in the judges' vote, so that now it was in favour of Cullen.

I believed that when a properly constituted meeting had come to a decision that had been ratified by all -- and that had involved much give and take on all sides -- such a decision should be binding. I informed the chairman and the other judges that they were welcome to add Cullen to the show, but in that case they could delete my name from the list of judges. And so, by Sunday, Pattenden had accepted my resignation. Another judge will take my place.

I'm sorry to disappoint Cullen because I know he would love to think I'm terribly indignant about his work, but I really don't think much of it at all.

Christopher Allen's weekly art reviews for The Weekend Australian begin on August 16.