When one looks at the rejects from the Archibald Prize, few portraits suggest a serious miscarriage of justice. I’ve long got over the fantasy that a poor year at the Archibald means the Salon will be full of wonders. It’s usually just more of the same. The selections for AGNSW and the S.H. Ervin shows are only as good as the quality of the entries, and this is a lacklustre year.

Of the Salon works, Noel Thurgate’s Portrait of Ann Thomson is one of the standouts. Although he is a consummately skilful draftsman, when attempting a major painting Thurgate feels the need to try a few tricksy things, if only to provide a ‘contemporary’ edge. In this picture, an artfully carved and textured panel doesn’t detract from the strength of the portrait, which captures Thomson’s character and confidence, as a painter who has just turned 90 but is still going strong.

Another painting that deserves a serious look is Evan Salmon’s Studio interior, reflection (self-portrait). As self-portraits go it’s almost aggressively modest. Salmon has painted a tiny version of his own face, captured in a mirror, within a detailed interior view of the studio. Even in reflection, the face is turned to one side, as if Salmon would prefer not to be noticed, asking us to consider the art, not the artist.

It could be argued that the actual portrait is too small for the work to warrant inclusion in the Archibald, but Noel McKenna has just picked up the Darling Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, for a painting in which the subject, Bill Nuttall, is but a tiny figure, posing with his horses in a landscape. Today the definition of portraiture has been expanded so far the boundaries are no longer visible. In art competitions, this places an extra emphasis on the judges’ subjectivity, which is where the trouble usually begins.

The best reason the Archibald judges might have had for omitting Joanna Braithwaite’s tongue-in-cheek Memory Lane (self-portrait), which shows the artist driving along with a car full of lizards, is once again that it is simply too large. It would, however, have been a showstopper alongside so many of the dull, poorly executed works they favoured.

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The judges might also have spared a thought for Paul Miller’s I Am Still (Self-Portrait), which celebrates his recovery from a serious operation. The work loses nothing in comparison with most of the paintings that actually got hung, and has an affirmative aspect that might speak to anyone who has come through their own brush with illness or mortality. There’s another case to be made for Sharon Billinge’s tiny portrait of her friend, Celeste Chandler, who died last year. Matters of life and death provide better reasons for portraiture than mere flattery. Sinead Davies, on the other hand, makes flattery look perfectly agreeable in a portrait of Heather Ewart, for which the veteran ABC presenter appears to have been sipping at the fountain of youth.

Paul Miller is one of those consistent painters who is consistently rejected from the Archibald. This year he is joined by previous winners, Tony Costa, Lewis Miller and Wendy Sharpe, along with artists who were once virtual regulars, such as Paul Newton, Rodney Pople, Jun Chen and Tom Carment.

We never seem to tire of the Archibald follies, even if it only ever offers a few gleams of gold in a muddy pool. The best interpretation one may put upon this phenomenon is that it’s a bit of fun – an annual festival that need not be taken too seriously. The worst is that it dominates the Sydney art scene so comprehensively it has become the only reason many people pay a ritual yearly visit to the AGNSW. In the long term, this is a worrisome trend because the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman become the public standard by which art is judged. We need to do better than that and consign these much-revered prizes back to a more realistic status – as one of those peculiar things Australians love but the rest of the world can’t understand. Utes and Vegemite spring to mind.