THE TARNISHED PRIZES
NO NATION ON EARTH CAN MATCH AUSTRALIA’S enduring love of art prizes. It reflects our obsession with sport (which is something we can do as well as anybody), allied with the perennial Cultural Cringe (the sense that we suffer from a lack of Old Masters and ruined temples).
The Cringe was named by A.A. Phillips in 1950 but it has been around since the early days of colonisation. The first concerted rebuttal arrived with P.R. Stephensen’s polemic, The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936), which made a forceful case for the value of Aboriginal culture and landscape painting.
This provided only limited reassurance for a country that liked to think of itself as a bastion of western civilisation, albeit on the
