Christopher Allen instead of Christopher Pearson, and the Archibalds instead of Tony Blair ...

Yes, there it is on the front page, an offer no one could refuse. Nothing so humble as an audience with the Pope, or the Queen, but the chance to win tickets to an audience with Tony Blair ...

An audience. So the language is debased.

Rested from his arduous task of bringing peace to the middle east, a job which has gone spiffingly and tremendously well, it seems Blair now has time to tour the antipodes, bestowing grace and insight on his humble subjects and devoted followers. The only trouble was when I clicked on the splash - so I could be outraged even more - it led me to a desert, a wilderness of World News. No competition, no prizes, no losers, and certainly no winners ...

Perhaps it will get better for later clickers, or is it time for the old joke? If first prize is an audience with Tony Blair, then surely second prize is only a year in hell?

Meanwhile, it being the season of the Archibald, it seemed like a good time to consider the downright awfulness of criticism in the mainstream media, and no better example can be found than Christopher Allen's effort in Quest for effect negates popular engagement in The Australian.

Now might be many good reasons why viewers might dislike this year's winner Ben Quilty's portrait of Margaret Olley, but what to make of a concluding line like this in a review:

Quilty has ability, but he should renounce gimmicks and the pull-apart pictures for which he is known and try painting instead.

The easy retort of course is that Allen should renounce half-assed cheap shots, snidery, and stupid remarks, and try writing a review instead.

But then what can you say about a notice that opens with this line:

This year's Archibald has been won by Ben Quilty with a portrait of Margaret Olley - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was won by Olley in a portrait of her by Quilty.

The Archibald has for many years been as much about the fame or notoriety of its sitters as about the quality of the paintings.

The easy corollary of course is that reviewers of the Archibald prize have for many years focussed on Archibald controversies because it's easier than writing about the art.

And when we get to actual Allen insights regarding this year's winner, there's a host of whitebread prejudices and bugger all in the way of wholegrain insights. For a start it seems that size is an issue:

Quilty's painting, however, is a very bad one on several scores. First, it is grotesquely oversized.

What reason can there be for painting the face of a tiny, elderly woman on this scale? Instead of intimacy and insight, we are faced with a massive surface that is at once emphatic and blank.

But not everyone wants to be Vermeer. Perhaps Quilty wanted a massive surface that's emphatic and blank, perhaps he wanted to avoid the banal, sentimental aspect of a tiny elderly woman on a small scale. Perhaps he thinks the notion of a painting being grotesquely oversized is a grotesquely irrelevant personal prejudice belonging to a reviewer who doesn't seem to have noticed that over the centuries some painters have favoured 'grotesequely oversized' as a way of doing business, and the results are none the worse for it ... at least if you have a taste for the kind of photorealism on view in MOMA with the works of Chuck Close. 8'4" x 7' for a self-portrait? Now that's a decent size.

For the rest of it, Allen gets agitated about photography:

The paint surface is discontinuous, with areas of thick pigment separated by wide spaces of white canvas. The effect is like a chromatic version of the polarisation into black and white that arises from repeated photocopying of the same image, and implies the use of a photograph as a map of the tonal and colour areas. This is a superficial trick that has nothing in common with a real painterly engagement with the subject.

A real painterly engagement with the subject?

What on earth does that mean?

Well the harping on photography is heading somewhere no doubt:

Quilty claims that he used etching and drawing as well as photographs in making this picture. I can believe this, because many painters can't actually obtain a likeness from copying a photograph, or even get the shape of the face right.

Nonetheless, the result looks like the extravagantly camouflaged transcription of a photo.

Yes, it's heading to the dismissal of the painting as a photo, thereby returning us to the controversies of the nineteen seventies, when John Bloomfield's large photo-realist portrait of director Tim Burstall was disqualified, because it was painted from a photo and Bloomfield had never met Burstall. (And as payback in 1981 Bloomfield threatened a legal action over Eric Smith's painting of Rudy Komon because of its resemblance to a photo ...)

All this followed from the prize's rule regarding the use of photographs, as if painters hadn't for centuries been cheating by using Kepler's camera obscura all the way up to the nineteenth century's camera lucida.

Don't get Peter Greenaway started, or we could be here for hours:

Just in general terms, I think it's important that every creator should try to use his own technology.

It has been a condition of all innovative and radical painters of the last 400, 500 years, since the Renaissance. People like da Vinci used subsquares and the new technology that was associated with navigation and mathematics. One of my favourite painters, Vermeer, working in the mid-seventeenth century Delft would use all the technologies related to polishing and making lenses. Almost certainly Vermeer used a sort of Camera Obscura, so he was the first cameraman, too, and that 300 years before the Lumière brothers even bothered about utilising first of all moving pictures. (here)

Oh you wretched radical movie loving, photograph endorsing heretic you ... but you know it's funny how you can see many many paintings and notice a kind of wide-angle effect in even those pretending to purport correct perspective (yes Tom Roberts and your potato gatherers at the NGV we're talking about you, but you're not the only one).

But of course all Allen's talk of photography is so he can arrive at that squelchy, snide put down as his closer:

Quilty has ability, but he should renounce gimmicks and the pull-apart pictures for which he is known and try painting instead.

Yep, if you happened to be in search of a smug, self-satisifed reviewer, surely all your prayers would be answered if you stumbled on this effort. Try sky-writing instead.

For years readers of The Australian suffered under the yoke of Giles Auty, a conservative reviewer - one hesitates to use the word critic - whose fragile legacy is discussed, in of all places, NSW HSC online, here:

“Critics puff and blow but maybe no one is listening. While art is often felt to be awfully fragile in fact the art market is inert and swayed not at all by the published opinions of critics. In material terms what does it matter that Giles Auty likes Hugh Ramsay?... and it impresses the art scene less that an Auty regularly rails against an incomprehensible avant-garde because those who are interested in such matters have long maintained their enthusiasm against a backdrop of widespread scepticism or even antagonism by the prophets of the popular media.”

It's good to see Allen carrying on the Auty tradition, beginning with his piece Why I quit the Blake Prize jury, and the clumsy attempt to construct a feud with Adam Cullen.

Speaking of photos:

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.

Procedural irregularity? Was that settling on a selection of paintings using a PowerPoint presentation? Oh Microsoft, devil's work, satan's empire, oh judges has it come to this ...

Never mind, after being kicked off the list, Cullen's painting was voted back in, to Allen's consternation and dismay, but only after Allen penned these immortal words:

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.

Indeed. What a pity Allen wasn't around at the time so he could have joined in the rioting about Stravinsky's music:

Parisian audiences could not comprehend why the composer would turn from the fantastic imagery of these ballets to the ugly primitivism of The Rite or, as Jacques Rivière put it, from "poetry" to "prose". Some, less sympathetic, christened the latter ballet "Le Massacre du printemps," referring as much to the riot it caused on opening night as to the strange way the work celebrated spring with Nijinksy's "epileptic convulsions" and Stravinsky's "painfully dissonant" music. (here)

But then it's the business of the critic to be wrong, or perhaps to think that musical truth must be discounted because it strikes the critic as sounding ugly ...

Allen wrapped up the tale of his jury resignation thusly:

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.

Which is a happy ending, because truly when it comes to Allen's opinions abut art, I don't think about them at all. Except in this joyous Archibald season ...

And there is another upside, apart from not attending an audience with Tony Blair.

Christopher Pearson is rabbiting on about education in The Australian, where the boring meets the predictable (Second-rate schools now academies), and instead of wasting time with it, on this rainy day in Sydney, I think I'll do a gallery tour.

Provided someone can explain why long suffering HSC art students have to deal with Giles Auty ...

What next? Make the poor hapless buggers read Christopher Allen. Or listen to the wisdom of Tony Blair? Talk about a quest for idle rhetoric affecting popular engagement.

So much suffering in the world ...

(Below: a photo of a painting which looks, so we're told, like a photo. Click on it to get it to a slightly larger, and therefore even more offensive size. Found here, while you can find all the finalists, or at least photos of the entries that made the finals, here).