Who needs prizes?

This week the Painters’ Hall in the City of London opened its doors for the second time to The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, launched last year by the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and the Lynn Foundation to promote the art of representational painting. The exhibition (on view until 2 December) is the newest addition to a growing list of prizes set up since the 1980s by interested parties to reverse the decline in specific areas of art. Some have been conspicuously successful: the BP Portrait Award, now the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular annual show, has played a major role in reviving the interest of younger artists in the genre of portraiture, as has the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in the medium of watercolour. Then there’s the ING Discerning Eye, founded to raise the profile of small works (here I must declare an interest — I’m a selector for this year’s show, at the Mall Galleries until Sunday), and the Jerwood Visual Arts series of prizes for painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and applied art (Jerwood Photography Awards 2006 is at the Jerwood Space in London SE1 until 9 December).

These prizes have stayed the course; others have foundered. The Lexmark European Art Prize, launched in 2003 on a tide of protest against the Turnerisation of contemporary art, was a one-year wonder; the Daily Mail’s Not the Turner Prize also ran out of steam when the Turner Prize became too dreary to protest against. A more serious loss has been the Hunting Art Prize, a genuinely open, unrestricted painting competition, which — like Liverpool’s biennial John Moores, now on its 24th showing at the Walker Gallery (until tomorrow) — gave unknowns the chance to show alongside established names. When Hunting withdrew funding last year after 25 years, many painters were left with an aching hole in their exhibiting calendar (the exhibition organisers Parker Harris are looking for a new sponsor).