Anne Sanders in Minefield: revisiting the historical document that is "the provincialism problemin CACSA Broadsheet no 40.2 Un Certain Regard returns to Terry Smith’s 1974 article ‘The Provincialism Problem’ that was published in ArtForum, then the most influential art magazine in the world.

This problem is structured around centre and periphery, dependence and its opposite, and the core tenet that acceptance of the metropolitan culture without question is the essence of provincialism. For Smith in 1974 the “metropolitan center for the visual arts”, was New York and that cultural transmission is one-way... outside the hegemonic metropolitan center. The provincial artist must break into this game to be internationally successful, but the most the provincial artist can aspire to is to be considered second-rate’.

Those Australian artists who, by definition, could not be part of the dominant centre were subject to the centre’s externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values” and they withdrew into, and were bounded by, a regionalism, which provided them with a kind of security in a society that was yet to develop a genuine avant garde.

Australian artists have no choice but to be provincial in a global culture's biennale circuitry, in which the North Atlantic is central. Provincial artists were condemned to provinciality. Smith defined provincialism as ‘an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values’--- New York retained tits hegemony by ‘writing the rules of the game in avant-gardist terms’, remaining ‘the sole judge of who gets to play, of how one plays, and of who wins.’

The model of centre versus periphery is an account of the power relationships between art institutions, especially galleries and artists during the period of formalist hegemony, including formalist approach to art criticism that lasted, until the 1970s.

It was the period of constantly looking for a national narrative that could be classified as distinctively Australian, and for whom the manifestation of place in art was part of the wider postcolonial search for an Australian identity, one irrevocably marked by post-war history. What often resulted from this search was an outdated Australian Antipodeanism--a national art with its attendant, insular regionalism.