The public loves to love it. The critics love to hate it. Journalists accept it as a historical inevitability. The Archibald prize, the face that stops the nation.
Every year, I have the same WhatsApp chats with fellow arts writers: who we think will win, who we wish would win; snaps of the abominations, cry-laughing and face-melting emojis; haggling about whether this is in fact the Worst Year. Every year spotting the Archibald trends becomes, if not an obsession, at least a sport: the extended era of brown suits; the post-millennial surge of Big Heads; the recurring waves of old white men in chairs. The 94-year trend of men painting men.
And every year I wonder what new ways Christopher Allen, The Australian’s long-serving art critic, will find to excoriate the “lurid”, “distasteful mess” of “deliberately bad” art that has become the bane of his professional existence.
I can’t quite muster up that level of vitriol; I like to grumble but there’s something beautifully daggy about the Archibald, and it’s hard to begrudge artists or the public a prize season that brings so much joy and impassioned conversation.
I have, however, noticed a special kind of derangement building in me across years of viewing discombobulating lineup after discombobulating lineup – each with at least one special gaslighting moment when you start to question your sanity.
This year, for me, it was a portrait of Adam Hyde, AKA the Aria-winning singer Keli Holiday: a supersized concoction with haunting eyes that seem to follow you around the room, and an aesthetic I heard an observer describe as “MS Paint”.
When this is given equal platform with, say, Liam Nunan’s tender, evocative and technically accomplished portrait of a fellow actor, Sheridan Harbridge, hungover and exhausted on the couch after a big night on the boards and at the post-show bar, then my brain starts to actively melt.
If you want to feel especially gaslit this year, go to SH Ervin gallery, across the city, for the Salon des Refusés. This is the annual showcase of the paintings rejected by the Archibald prize judges – but there are so many portraits that could be swapped into either exhibition without anyone batting an eyelid that you are forced to surrender to the suspicion that, actually, all of this is a bit of nonsense.
Of course, the Refusés also has its own hauntings – this year a melancholic portrait of the artist Patricia Piccinini by former Archibald prize-winner Wendy Sharpe features four pendulous, supersized breasts and a gaping butthole. But overall it’s a collection of accomplished paintings by a roll call of regular Archibald finalists and winners. Viewed together, it’s honestly a little boring. Thank God for the butthole.
So what’s going on? On what basis are these decisions about who and what makes the Archibald cut being made?
The prize’s remit is excellent portraits “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics”, painted in the last 12 months by an Australian resident, and based on at least one “live sitting”. It’s judged by the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ board of trustees: a group largely composed of business executives but always including two artists (now Tony Albert and Caroline Rothwell).
According to the major broadsheet critics, the Archibald’s problems stem from a vexed intersection of woke politics, bad taste and crass commercialism. When you encourage “minorities” and “special interest groups” who are not classically trained painters, and you let people with no specialist knowledge of art choose the paintings – people who are more interested in ticket sales and media coverage than critical approbation – you’re going to get a freak show for a visually illiterate audience that signifies, at least to Nine’s former art critic John McDonald, nothing less than the “decline of the West”. So goes the grumbling.
There are more mundane reasons the Archibald is so consistently bonkers: it’s only half about the art. As the longtime former Archibald curator Anne Ryan said, the judging process is not only about looking for “great painting” but equally about “who is painted [and] the stories of the people that the artists have chosen to paint”, and how the exhibition collectively reflects the year that was in Australia.
You start to understand why a portrait of “Bondi hero” Ahmed al-Ahmed or the indie-horror mavens the Philippou Brothers has a greater chance of being selected for the Archibald than 27-time finalist Robert Hannaford’s painting of his oncologist (rejected this year and hanging in the Refusés).
There are of course anomalies and puzzles. It’s not obvious – to me – why Tom Carment’s self-portrait makes the Archibald cut above Lewis Miller’s (in the Refusés).
But here’s an extra clue to the judging process: two former artist judges told me that they consider whether a submission is that particular painter’s best work. In other words, artists are effectively judged against themselves.
And perhaps the final pieces of the puzzle: the judging is an epic task done relatively quickly: this year 59 Archibald finalists were selected from 1,034 entries over a weekend, alongside the judging of 773 Wynne entries. The assignment alone makes me feel deranged.
Which is all to say: I do not begrudge anyone a whinge about the Archibald prize, which is objectively bonkers. Though I do wish the media commentary was more concerned with the art than the culture wars, and that there were a little less policing of technique and aesthetics.
It sounds obvious, but we all have our own taste! Our own wants and needs from art! Adrian Jangala Robertson’s Babadook-adjacent portrait of the film-maker Dylan River and Meagan Pelham’s portrait of Jessica Rowe may not please McDonald’s refined palate but I like them. One is delightfully strange and spooky; the other radiates joy and affection. Both make me smile. And they drive home one of the most fundamental yet amazing aspects of being a human living among other humans: that we all see things differently.