The circus is in town with cheap thrills aplenty

You would think the logical way to run a portrait prize would be to sort out the best of the pictures submitted for an exhibition of finalists and then select the most outstanding of these as the winner.

Yet that is not actually how the Archibald works.

Instead, the Art Gallery of NSW trustees manifestly put variety before quality, even at the cost of including a majority of bad, ugly, kitsch, sentimental and commercial work.

The Archibald Prize has often been called a circus, and that is indeed what it is: a form of lurid entertainment that is meant to surprise and shock.

In a kind of cruel ritual, the trustees let the packers choose the most egregious example of photographic kitsch for the Packing Room Prize before, a week later, demonstrating their superior taste by choosing something ostensibly more refined, or at least less obvious.

This year’s winner, Tony Costa’s portrait of Lindy Lee, is neither hyperreal nor sensationalistic. Although bigger than it needs to be, Costa’s portrait has the quiet intensity one would expect of a person painted in the act of meditating, and a pared-back style that alludes to the traditional simplicity and even deliberate coarseness of Zen brush painting.

The background is void but warm, suggesting stillness and emptiness. The eyes are closed or half-closed, lids lowered. If anything, there is a slight paradox in painting the portrait of a person who is in a state of withdrawing from the self that is, in contrast, so crudely in evidence in other pictures.

This is said to be the first time the Archibald has been awarded to a portrait of an Asian subject, although in fact an Asian woman was included in Francis Giacco’s 1994 winner, Homage to John Reichard.

Christopher Allen is The Weekend Australian’s national art critic