It gave extravagant presentations a greater status than modest ones. Pascoe's was not a statement of Council policy, but it suggests that over a decade the practical implications of the rhetoric that policy-makers inherited from the Trust have been expensive enough and inequitable enough to justify considerable suspicion of the word excellence. Yet it will probably continue to be a persistent rhetoric. Excellence' reverberates with that bourgeois utopianism in which money and political power are politely separated from and subordinated to the higher things of life, such as Art. It implies a kind of sovereignty of good taste.
Excellence is a language of the powerful, which effaces the social basis of that power.
Perhaps the most consequential judge of the difference between the excellent and the non-excellent has been the Government itself, for its funding decisions have been made with a full view of the field. The act of patronage is itself a crude but singular and unambiguous expression of official confidence in a cultural activity. The implied notion of a single national set of standards against which all applicants must ultimately be judged is a cultural fiction annually retold in the announcements of who got what. Though there are many agencies in many governments making these judgements, the decisions of State and Commonwealth agencies have tended to be mutually reinforcing. It is as if the national accounting of both 'taste' and public money were subject to the same national mind.