All fun-loving, thrilled-by-politics Canberrans love the ways in which Canberra's thoroughfares are presently decorated by the portrait-corflutes of candidates in the ACT election.

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Our roadsides are usually featurelessly dull and dominated by nondescript trees. But at election times these verges come alive with portraiture, with a host of laughing and smiling faces.

And as well as being novel and decorative, this form of advertising, addressed to the simple-minded who imagine a candidate's face is something to go by, serves an important function in a democracy where even every politically-illiterate ignoramus has a vote.

So, yes, these linear portrait galleries are a welcome novelty. But how might they be made better, more characterful, more entertaining? How might we expand this election-time phenomenon to become a kind of festival of portraiture unique to Canberra?

For as things are, there is a disappointing monotony about the corflutes. One flatteringly photographed smiling face is much like another. This results in what I have just called these possible "linear portrait galleries" being less like portrait galleries, really, than like page after page of others' family photo albums of little interest to the rest of us.

Portraiture is especially on my mind now not only because the corflutes are on display but also because I have just been to see, at the Orange Regional Gallery, this year's exhibition of the finalists in the vaunted Archibald Prize for portraiture. There should be so much more to portraiture, the Archibald finalists' works always remind us, than the straight capturing of just a ho-hum likeness.

So what if, on top of the practical purposes of political advertising, the whole election-time phenomenon was treated as a kind of Art Prize with breathtaking cash prizes using the ACT government's........

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