It would be impossible not to write something in this issue about Grayson Perry, the winner of the 2003 Turner Prize for art, because he accepted the award wearing a "little girl" style frock, petticoats, lacy ankle socks and red Mary Jane shoes. A few readers have sent me web sites with the news of the prize.

That Grayson is a cross dresser who enjoys dressing as a little girl is important, but the win has highlighted other issues as well, which I personally believe to be even more important.

The Turner Prize is hosted by 'Tate Modern', an offshoot of the Tate Gallery, which houses the majority of the works of J.M.W. Turner (1775 - 1851), probably Britain's greatest painter (it is interesting that he was born on April 23, as was, almost certainly, William Shakespeare. Thus England's greatest poet, and England's greatest painter, were both born on St George's Day, the day of the country's patron saint).

Tate Modern isn't much like the old Tate, and up until now the Turner Prize winning entries would not have even been recognised as art by Turner himself. The prize was first awarded in 1984, and has more and more become a junk shop for 'conceptual art'. Now I am not quite so mustily conservative as some readers think, and I have nothing against the idea of conceptual art. If a self-styled artist is able to arrange a carefully chosen collection of objets trouve, photographs, bits and pieces of furniture and machinery, and organic material, to powerfully and surprisingly express a particular idea, then I believe that that can certainly qualify as art, albeit of an abstract and intellectual kind.

However, in the case of the Turner Prize, 'conceptual art' has become merely a euphemism for 'grossly and intentionally offensive rubbish'. Neither talent, nor craftsmanship, have been in evidence. When Gilbert and George, whose work I once thoroughly enjoyed, thirty years ago sang 'Underneath the Arches' as a duo of gilded living sculptures, it was a triumph of conceptual art, and absolutely hypnotic. However, their later work has included some of worst entries in the Turner Prize's sorry history. Just before I left England to come to Australia, the 2001 Turner Prize was presented by Madonna the pop singer (this is serious stuff, as you can see) to somebody whose winning work of conceptual art was a set of lights going on and off in an empty gallery. When asked what 'concept' this expressed, he stated that he had no idea.

Neil Tweedie wrote the following in October:

'The leaves are falling and the nights drawing in. And down at Tate Britain an inflatable doll is engaged in sexual activity with another, as the two recline on a lilo. The Turner Prize is back.

'Yesterday, the work of the four finalists for the prize, to be announced on Dec 7, went on display by the banks of the Thames. The least shocking aspect of the exhibition was the desire, largely unfulfilled, to shock... It is all about sex, fear, decay and the inevitability of death. So no change there, then.

'Many have given up completely on the Turner, mocking it as a receptacle for all that is silly in British contemporary art. But that did not stop the people at the Tate from extolling the qualities of the work being shown ...'

Once upon a time, when the Old Masters were painting, artists were craftsmen who had spent a lifetime learning their craft, and hard-headed businessmen as well. The Master's studio employed apprentices and bookkeepers, and the artist himself was as much a scientist and mathematician as a painter. The preparation of his exquisitely tinted paints, often by secret recipes, entailed considerable chemical and laboratory skills, and the preparation of the canvas, and the finishing oils, was almost as complex. During the Renaissance painters, not physicians, were at the forefront of research and discovery in anatomy. The Old Masters extensively studied and used the 'Divine Proportion' of mathematics, and an entire branch of geometry, Projective Geometry, grew out of the researches and works of the greatest Renaissance artists.

These were men of towering intellect and great imagination, and superb craftsmen as well - in the paragraph immediately above I haven't even mentioned the myriad skills involved in actually applying the rare and precious colours to the canvas. Damien Hirst's rotting animal carcasses do not, in this exalted company, quite make the grade.

In the last week before the award presentation on Sunday evening, December 7, the bookmakers had the Chapman brothers as hot favourites to take the prize. And why not? Their work was undoubtedly the most tasteless and offensive, and parodied the work of Goya, a much greater artist (and a much more shocking artist, ironically), than the Chapman lads will ever be. Another of the four finalists was simply a videotape of a running man, and another the usual putrefying organic matter; this time apples rather than animals. So we've all been there before.

Grayson Perry arrived at the ceremony as an outsider, and even his wife did not think that he could win, the Turner Prize being what it is. His sin was that he actually does have creative technical talent, and the ability to craft objects of wondrous beauty. His medium is ceramics, and a few of his vases are illustrated at the bottom of the page. Martin Gayford's comment under the heading of this article says much, and Grayson himself showed that he was aware that the truly shocking part about his triumph was not that he publicly wears "little girl" clothes, but that he is a craftsman, and not involved in the conceptual art racket. His themes are usually distressing and disturbing, but that is the proper perogative of the artist. Goya's paintings were much more so.

The win then might have been a victory for cross dressing but it was, much more importantly in my opinion, a victory for art itself. As Grayson commented with wry triumph, "At least nobody can look at my work and say, 'My eight year old daughter could have done that.' "

With regard to the cross dressing which, after all, is the reason why an essay about the Turner Prize is appearing in 'Petticoat Discipline Quarterly', Grayson (or Claire) has done a great deal of good there too. Over the years I have received hundreds of letters from distressed readers whose wives or lovers will not accept their yearning to dress as a little girl. Inevitably the female partner thinks that it is 'sick', and totally unacceptable to them.

And now somebody just like that has won a valuable and prestigious art prize, and has appeared on BBC television with a fully accepting spouse, and a daughter. It cannot have done the cause of acceptance and understanding of cross dressers, especially 'transgenerational' cross dressers, any harm at all. Suddenly, sissy little girls are 'flavour of the month'! Who would ever have thought it possible?

I would like to think that Grayson appeared at the ceremony dressed as he was, not to shock (in the art world, how boring and cliched that would be!) but precisely in order to show that "little girl" cross dressing is maritaly healthy and, for many men, an extremely important need. 

Susan MacDonald