All is won.

Everybody I've ever talked to about the prizes they hand out at the Venice Biennale agrees on one thing: they ought to quit handing them out. Career awards for artists - $30,000 one-year Guggenheim fellowships, $350.000 five-year MacArthur "genius" grants, or those billion-yen pseudo-Nobels that some Japanese company has concocted to make the already rich and famous richer and more famous - retain some spurious dignity mostly because they lump artists together with scientists and make rooftop performance pieces seem (momentarily) as socially meritorious as a vaccine for the common cold. But prizes at an art exhibition are inherently tacky, at least to Americans; they always smack of the blue ribbon the principal tacked onto the lower-right corner of your crayon drawing - irrelevant praise from a dubious source. Prizes turn the Venice Biennale into the espresso version of the Dutchess County Fair.

But award them Venice does, apparently believing that gold statuettes - oops, Golden Lions - lend the conglomeration of exhibitions at the Biennale the kind of panache as sociated with the Cannes Film Festival and its eagerly anticipated Palmes d'or. (Hell, even I want to know what's going to be head-lining at the Angelika Film Center next month.) We Americans probably shouldn't sneer too visibly. It was, after all, Robert Rauschenberg's 1964 Leone d'oro for his infamous Bed, 1955, that put him, Leo Castelli, Pop art, New York, and contemporary American art over the top with a Continental audience that still thought Pierre Soulages the equal of Franz Kline.

The one constant among the prizes - at least in recent years - is that they're always quirky enough to make you think the internationally composed jury has some agenda other than simply honoring what it honestly sees as the best in each category. In 1993, for example, the big yellow pussycat for sculpture went to Robert Wilson for an installation that was actually more pertinent to his better-known profession in the theater. Richard Hamilton, the British Pop artist, and Antoni Tapies, the Spanish abstractionist, shared the painting prize in a kind of Solomon's-baby decision in reverse. Anyone who smelled "let's send a message" in the sculpture award and "lets make a deal" in painting should have trusted his nose.

This year the painting prize went to R. B. Kitaj. honors in sculpture to Gary Hill, and the nod for best pavilion to Egypt. What was once the "Aperto" prize and is now the Premio Duemilia (a bucks award - about 15,000 of 'em) went to Kathy Prendergast, and the purchase prize (in which the work goes to the Biennale archives in exchange for about $20,000) to Ignacio Iturria. There were also four honorable mentions, their only real function, as we all know, being to embarrass recipients obviously considered not radical enough to be ostracized but really not good enough to win money or a statuette. So we kindly won't mention them. And truth be told, the selections of Prendergast, an Irish artist (for her delicate map drawings in pencil of the world's capital cities), and Ms. Iturria from Uruguay (for her wistful paintings of little people in compartments - a bit like those Barney's ads, only not so self-satisfied) are actually reasonable, if not inspired. It's the Lions 'n' Pavilions that give one pause.

First, let's backtrack to the jurors: Tomas Llorens from Spain, Carlo Arturo Quintavalle from host Italy, Wenzel Jacob from Germany, Shuji Takashina of Japan and, according to one of the catalogue's opening pages, Robert Hughes of the United States and Australia. Aha! Another thing we all know is what a bully Hughes is. Why, he probably fumed and blustered until the other jurors, who come from countries not quite as big as all outdoors (like the U.S. and Australia are), caved into handing the dauber's prize to that ol' School of London favorite Kitaj, and the sculpture award to a video artist who's an American. Didn't Hughes write practically the only favorable (if qualified) review of Kitaj's pretentious, prolix retrospective? And doesn't Hughes, like all conservative critics who nevertheless want to remain somewhere to the left of Hilton Kramer, need to come out once in a while in favor of a post-Modernist artist, preferably one working in a "new" medium like video installation? And Egypt . . . well, Egypt's non-Western, relatively new on the art-fair scene, and represented by three under-40 artists - more evidence of a juror's open-mindedness.

Except that Hughes wasn't a juror. The way he tells it, "I'd love to give you the inside track on the prizes, but I wasn't on the jury. I think somebody thought it would be a good idea to have me on it. As the opening of the Biennale approached, I began to get this flurry of faxes asking when I was coming to judge the stuff. I said it was certainly too late to book a hotel room. The Biennale people said, 'That's all right, we'll arrange it.' I said they didn't understand that if I judged the exhibition, I couldn't review it - conflict of interest. That's a concept the Italians don't understand. And that's also just the kind of thing the Machiavellian rumor mill would spin out. Some people in the art world would love to catch me in that kind of a conflict. But I haven't even been to Venice [for the Biennale] yet, and I can prove I wasn't there by all the ticket stubs I don't have."

Hughes doesn't have to prove that unicorns don't exist: the Biennale press office confirms that his name slipped onto the roster only because his demurral came after the catalogue-to-press deadline had passed. What Crocodile-Dundee-meets-Guido-Sarducci misunderstanding led to the mistake, we'll probably never know. And without Hughes as head conspirator (nice thought, though, wasn't it?), hidden agendas seem to vanish. I tried to get the other panelists on the phone after I got home from Venice, but they were by then far-flung and/or impossible to reach. So all I can provide by way of explanation are the jury's gaseous official statements concerning their "unanimous" decisions. (Why do I envision a table laden with empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays, from whose periphery a hoarse, tired voice utters the equivalent of, "Oh all right, let's make it unanimous"?)

Re Kitaj: "For his coherent research, which rediscovers in the 'Modern' the roots of European painting and brings a new opening to the collective imagination." I'm glad the research is coherent, because the pictures aren't. And I think the jury means Kitaj rediscovered the roots of the Modern in European painting, not the reverse. Anyway, Kitaj had only a few pictures in the "Identity and Alterity" show, whereas another School of London favorite, Leon Kossoff, had an entire buildingful as the occupant of the British pavilion. So why not Kossoff as the prizewinner? One reason, in my guess: even without Hughes on the jury, there's a considerable, albeit vague, sentiment out there to be extra nice to Kitaj after the drubbing he took for the retrospective, especially in the British press, and sometimes on apparently extraesthetic criteria.

Re Hill: "For his successful proposal of a radical and refined personal research, with expressive methods which are attentive to new technologies." Gee, you could have said the same of Bill Viola, this year's inhabitant of the American pavilion. But you also heard it said a lot around the Giardini that Hill's one untitled piece - projections on two opposing walls, with a metal floor maze in the middle - was better than Viola's five put together. Some of that opinion has to do with the stupefying amount of press Viola has gotten over the last few years (I've written a share), and with (I think) a backlash against MacArthur winners. Viola seems to feel that backlash: in all his bios in my Biennale folder, the only one that mentions his MacArthur is one from his English dealer, Anthony d'Offay, and I think I slipped it in there accidentally. Awarding the sculpture Golden Lion to the other American video artist may have been pointed. Or maybe not.

Re Egypt: "Because the Pavilion proposes a successful integration, within a complex architectural itinerary the original idea by three young artists who connect the tradition of Western modern art with ancient models of Egyptian culture." Rauschenberg - or assemblage in general - looms larger in this work than the pyramids. Like I said, non-Western, new on the scene, and with young artists. A feel-good award.

Peter Plagens is an abstract painter and the art critic for Newsweek magazine.