An Australian Spin on Sport and Art
The Basil Sellers Art Prize
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Basil Sellers exhibits all the ambition, long term strategy and sheer bloody mindedness of an elite athlete. In 2008 the businessman and philanthropist, with the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, instigated a ten year program of biennial prizes dedicated to art about sport. Offering $100,000 prize money, one of Australia’s richest art awards, the Basil Sellers Art Prize is squarely aimed at making sport a more prevalent subject in contemporary Australian art. The championing of sport as a subject for the arts is nothing new. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin set about establishing the modern day Olympics at the close of the nineteenth century, he was adamant that it follow the precedent of the ancient Greek Games by instituting artistic competitions as one of its central activities.1 Although Olympic art competitions officially ceased in 1948 their legacy lingers in the gargantuan cultural events that accompany each instalment of the games, as in the case of the recent London 2012 Festival.2
What distinguishes the Basil Sellers Prize is its national agenda. Australia, as a nation, has a particularly rabid infatuation with sport in all its forms. For evidence of this we need only think of the hordes of sleep deprived people stumbling about with bleary eyes and a newly acquired passion for the world of cycling during Cadel Evans’s herculean efforts to win the 2011 Tour de France. The abundance of government, corporate and private resources dedicated to a dazzling array of domestic and international sporting events points to sports special status within the national psyche. In 1962, social commentator Donald Horne argued,
Sport to many Australians is life and the rest a shadow. Sport has