Northcote's new art prize only wants the bizarre

There's a new art prize in Northcote, and it isn't looking for the best painting in the room. It's looking for the one you can't stop thinking about.

The Northcote Organisation of Bizarre Art, NOOBA for short, holds its first exhibition at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre on High Street from 10 to 15 November. There are 72 paintings and objects on the walls, around $100,000 worth of art, most of it for sale. There's $2,000 for the winner, and no judge. Visitors get three dot stickers each and put them next to the work they find most bizarre. Not the most beautiful. The most bizarre.

We asked founder Craig Burton what that means, and three of the artists what they brought.

Why Northcote

"I wanted to run an art exhibition. I sort of did once 30 years ago in a sharehouse in Eltham. We took all the furniture out," Craig says. "This one is much more serious. And it has got more serious as it has progressed. The response was large. There is a lot of bizarre art."

And the location? "Northcote is a hotbed of creativity. High Street is ground zero. It won't last forever, but for now this is where people come to see The New."

“Not Northside, not Melbourne, not Australia, Northcote. And South Northcote at that! You know SoHo, this will be NoCo.”

What counts as bizarre art

NOOBA describes bizarre art as something between a doodle and a masterpiece. Nothing moderate, mediocre or middling. We asked Craig for a work that made him think, that's it.

"Yes, Mr Joshua Smith, by William Dobell. This was also important to Brett Whiteley," he says. "It's bizarre because Dobell introduced a whole range of new meanings for what was supposed to be a straight portrait. Critically, for NOOBA's idea of bizarre, not all Dobell's reasons are obvious to the viewer. Or at least that's the impression you are left with: wonder (as in 'I wonder...')."

Closer to now, he points to The Beautiful and The Damned, a painting by Madeleine Casey that turned up for sale on Facebook Marketplace. "Madeleine Casey is a Saatchi gallery artist, no less."

"It's bizarre. What are those people doing in the piece?! I have no idea. Jesus is shown also in drag? Or is it the pink plasma of the burning television? Is that guy dead? You are going to stare at this piece if you find it in someone's house."

“Bizarre art makes great art for the home. You never forget it.”

Bizarre doesn't mean careless. "By doodle-to-masterpiece I mean that the effect of the piece doesn't rest on the technique. I've said elsewhere that we wanted bizarre works that are 'effortful' so a few splats may not win us over. But all the works we have in the show have considerable investment in work and technique in them. None of them seem like accidents. I don't think any are misfires, either."

If you can't beat the camera

NOOBA's line is that all breakthrough art looked bizarre in its time. For Craig, the clearest case is cubism. "The early cubists. They were reacting against cheap, fast, super realistic photography. Now it's AI."

"Braque in particular: look at his still lifes (The Crystal Vase 1929). He wants to make a still life but he knows the camera will beat him. If you can't beat the camera, go another way: convey human meaning in ways that go beyond being faithful to the subject."

He's less keen on Picasso, and sends us to Jonathan Richman's song about him by way of explanation.

So where does generative AI fit? "Generative AI is a bubble in more than one way. Conventionally a whole lot of people are going to lose a fortune. But indirectly people will come to see that generative AI is very limited. It's magic for certain kinds of problems, like AI always has been. But it isn't going to take over creating human culture because generative AI is entirely derivative."

“You can get some great Jeff Koons kitschy mashups out of ChatGPT. But you won't get The New.”

"It's also pretty hard to get content out that isn't complete and direct in its meaning. You have to tell your generative AI tool what the actual composition is, and even then it will stick stuff in to help make it make sense."

The Noobric

Nearly 300 works came in. Getting down to 72 was the job of a small committee. "The Noobric Committee consists of a German botanist and a tax expert. We had another person who designs helicopters but he was moving house and had to pull out."

The committee scored every work against The Noobric, which is NOOBA's rubric. "It is pretty simple: effortful works, multiple meanings (that don't have to make sense), memorable, unintentional effects on the viewer, X Factor. The X Factor is worth 30 points and in fact is the trigger for 'Oh my god!'"

The rejections went over well too. "I've been flattered by people we rejected thanking me for the most refreshing rejection letter that they got."

Why the public picks

"You don't need to be a cook to know good cooking. This applies to bizarre," Craig says. "It's not about picking out portraiture technique, it's about bizarre. The winner will be the most bizarre, not the best looking."

“One artist we had to turn away said she didn't know whether it (rejection) was actually a compliment. So we have no idea what the public is going to find the most bizarre. We don't need a judge.”

Three of the artists

Raymond Juru

Raymond's work is about getting around Melbourne. "A closer look at the unstoppable beast that is the Victorian public transport system," he says. "This artwork brings life to something that we typically wouldn't look at more than once."

What's he looking forward to? "I'm looking forward to seeing all of the other bizarre art and meeting the great/weird minds behind the work."

Lucy Fekete

Lucy paints portraits and teaches acrylic painting at the Victorian Artists Society. Her piece in the show is called Amalgam. "The physical embodiment of Murphy's Law, with a drink in hand and shoelaces untied," she says.

"The idea of rolling every unfortunate event into one humanoid vessel is pretty bizarre in itself. Add a clown's face, a bottle of booze and untied shoelaces, and you've got a recipe for disaster."

"I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing the amazing and 'out there' ideas created by the other finalists. And I'm further excited at the opportunity to meet like minded creative people."

Phillip Adams

Phillip is a choreographer, and his piece, Blame Phillip, is a graveyard of teddy bears. "My work Blame Phillip draws on a Looney Tunes parody of the catacombs, a bizarre teddy bear graveyard assemblage. The teddy bear represents my first childhood encounter with a furry fantasy friend, an innocent and intimate relationship that, through adolescence, took on an eroticism before being abandoned by the age of ten."

"At first viewing, the beheaded bears and severed limbs, turned inside out, appear macabre and disturbing yet humorous in their reference to the acceptable violence of cartoons."

“Beneath this grotesque humour, however, lies a meditation on the loss of childhood innocence, desire and fantasy.”

Loading @noobaprize on Instagram

"An amassed exhibition from artists that prosper in the weird, wild and wonderful," he says of the show. "It's exciting to think about where an art exhibition that seeks out the bizarre can lead to in years to come."

Before NOOBA

We asked Craig what he did before NOOBA. "I've done everything! But not a proper art exhibition. I love the arts. I am more connected to the performing arts and dance. If anything, 2D works are easier to consume: they don't move."

One earlier project stands out. "I made a telephone voting system (for serious elections). The client (government) needed it also in Portuguese. We couldn't get Portuguese voice talent in time. So I used Google Translate and I mimicked the Portuguese and that got recorded. People fell for it."

Not a creative person?

We asked Craig what he'd tell someone who thinks they're not a creative person.

"It's almost rage bait! People are clever, curious and creative, all of them. It's irrepressible. What's more interesting is whether your project to build a ship in a bottle constitutes creativity any more than my project to organise a gender reveal bomb at a drag race. You can't say neither is creative."

"Robert Hughes the critic refused to write a eulogy for Brett Whiteley. He said Whiteley wasted his talent. I took that on board. Then I read Art, Life and the Other Thing, a Whiteley bio. Whiteley was Australia's premier bizarre artist. He was hugely creative. Maybe he had too big a space to fill?"

“Well we have 72 artists who should be seen, and thought about as emerging Whiteleys.”

Go and see it

As for which work Craig can't stop thinking about, he won't say. "I think about a lot of them. My god, what will the public think?"

It's new, and he doesn't know how it'll go. "This is why it has a soft opening on the 10th building up to a combined Opening and Closing on the 14th. It's still open the 15th. I guess that is bizarre."

The combined opening and closing is on Saturday 14 November. The NOOBA Art Prize is on at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, 189 High Street, Northcote, from 10 to 15 November 2026, 11am to 8pm. Entry is free, with tickets through noobaprize.au. Voting closes at 6pm on 14 November. Find out more at noobaprize.au and on Instagram at @noobaprize, and see more from Raymond Juru, Lucy Fekete and Phillip Adams.