CHARLES WOOLEY

On dismal street performers and his loss at this year’s Archibald Prize

Sitting outside for coffee at Maldini’s on a cold morning, only our table is occupied. My companions want to go in, but I always insist Tasmania is a “Mediterranean island”. “Same latitude as Rome and Oporto and the South of France,” I say through chattering teeth. “I’ll ask the waiter to turn on the overhead radiators.”

It isn’t really the weather that has emptied the outside dining area, though; it is the busker 100m away. He isn’t singing. He is bellowing in some kind of incomprehensible rant. He is not playing an instrument and his only equipment is a hat into which nobody is putting money. Why would they? Everyone, especially the unfortunate restaurant staff, agree this was an incommodious din.

His performance is truly awful. It is bad even by Salamanca standards – and there are no standards here. One day there is a girl with a beautiful voice, the next a failing Bob Dylan impersonator. But today wins the waiter’s prize for the worst ever.

I could be wrong, as I so often am on artistic matters. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to learn our man is an acclaimed international street artist who has turned down lucrative recording contracts in Europe and the US because he prefers the gritty artistic integrity of the chilly Salamanca pavement.

My blunt companion from Queensland wants to give our yelling troubadour “$10 to eff off”, but I feel that could be hurtful. The poor fellow might be doing his best, but the offer of cash does raise the possibility some buskers are running a kind of protection racket: “Nice restaurant you’ve got here, Mr Maldini. It would be a pity if something should happen to it to drive away your customers.”

I leave the table to phone a Hobart City Council contact while the busker roars in the background.

“Do you need to be registered to busk in the street?” “What?” “Do buskers need a licence to busk?” “Yeah, they need to be registered. What’s that terrible noise?”

“It’s a busker at Salamanca. Did he need to pass an audition?” “What?” “Did he audition?” “Mate, I can’t hear you for the busker. Ring back when you’re somewhere quieter.”

Time passes. Much later in the day I’m on the other side of Sullivan’s Cove discussing the perplexing problems of artistic judgment. I’m with artist Geoffrey Dyer and writer Richard Flanagan and we are having a few commiserating drinks over my abject failure at this year’s Archibald Prize. I’ve already forgotten who won the popular portraiture competition, but it certainly wasn’t Dyer’s excellent painting of your columnist.

A few years ago, he won with his portrait of Flanagan, so it’s pretty clear who is responsible for this year’s failure.

“I didn’t even get hung,” I lament. “I have come to realise in this case failure lies with the sitter, not the painter. We failed but it’s my fault. I am too boring or not worthy enough, or both.”

Flanagan consoles me: “Charlie, there’s a lot of serendipity in it. You’ve entered the world of artistic rivalry where there’s no reason, no justice and no logic.”

I reply: “No wonder you artistic types get embittered.”

Flanagan agrees. “Yes, it would be very easy to be embittered. Because there are always lunatic hidden agendas. Literary judges are just as shocking. It’s a world that is just mad.”

Who wouldn’t want to be painted by the luminary Dyer, so of course I enjoyed the process of “sitting” in his artistic midden of a studio as much as I think he enjoyed the act of painting.

“I like the portrait. It works,” he says. “It grew as we worked. You emerged out of it with all the stigmata of a long life in journalism. There’s also a nod to Bob Hawke on the turps with you at the SCG last summer. Maybe that went against us. But great portraiture always has to be on the precipice and that’s always a dangerous place to be.”

Dyer took it on the chin much better than I did.

“Look, I don’t want to be seen as a grumpy old previous winner complaining about not getting hung while a lot of mediocre stuff got up,” he says. “Our painting went beyond the banal. It’s a good portrait and it will stand the test of time.”

I doubt I will ever be able to afford the portrait, but I do like it. My wife, Donna, reckons he’s got me, though I’ve always seen myself more as wryly amused, with less of the world-weary darkness he intuited. Perhaps it’s the “stigmata” showing at last.

Dyer thinks the good thing is we are still friends. “It’s a dangerous shared ordeal, portraiture,” he says. “As a landscape artist, the worst that can happen is hypothermia. In portraiture you can lose friends, but I think we are closer mates now.”

Dyer is right about that odd chemistry of the pigments. We are closer. Still, I’m not sure he had to give me a red nose. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why we lost.