Compared to the first Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, which took place in 2008, this weekend's second CNAAs—Portland Art Museum's celebration of the region's leading living artists—were depressing.

First, the news: Of the seven artists nominated for the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize (Chris Antemann, John Buck, John Grade, Jerry Iverson, Susie Lee, Megan Murphy, and Michelle Ross), Seattle-based John Grade was the winner. (Full disclosure: I am one of Stranger Genius winner Lee's video portrait subjects in the CNAA exhibition, which I won't be fully reviewing, and which meant that I stood in front of an image of myself nude for 30 minutes straight on Saturday, which is a weird experience.)

2008's winner was Seattle's Whiting Tennis, selected from a cracklingly great crew of artists rounded out by Jeffry Mitchell, Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, and Marie Watt. Their exhibition was big and bold, a feast spread out in the museum's main first-floor galleries (my review here).

This time, the exhibition is squished into a second-floor corner. (Meanwhile, there are seven artists rather than five, which makes no sense.) Taken together, the work is intensely sedate. If you saw this as the representation of Northwest art, you'd have no idea what's happening here. You'd think Northwest artists were either obsessed with the appearance of technical refinement to the point of being dullards, or stuck in a 1970s corporate-lobby abstraction nightmare.

Not that anyone is likely even to see the CNAA show. It sat empty Saturday while crowds jammed the main first-floor galleries for The Allure of the Automobile—the blockbuster traveling show billed by the museum as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see ... truly rolling works of art"—"16 of the world’s most luxurious, rare, and brilliantly conceived automobiles."

Okay, then.