I like the corflutes, and would like to see other sorts of corflute displays at all sorts of times instead of just this quadrennial election-time orgy of them.

Although there is some raging against them in letters to the editor, one knows that those gnashing their dentures in this way are not representative of Canberrans, per se. Most of us either quite like the corflutes or no more have strong feelings about them than we do about the roadside trees and shrubs that flower in the spring (tra-la, again).

Quite apart from their simple effectiveness as ads, the corflutes seem a kind of socio-political artform. For this ACT moment our highways are linear portrait galleries since overwhelmingly the corflutes are portraits. And to be indifferent to portraiture, to displays of the human face, is to be indifferent to life.

And what if there is something about our unhappy, mask-requiring times that makes us appreciative of the naked faces on our bare-faced corflutes? Popping up online, a lustrous piece Turn And Face The Strange: Darcey Steinke On Our New Life With Masks makes sense of our affections for the bare face.

Darcey Steinke is living in a time and in a place, upstate New York, where mask-wearers are everywhere. She muses that looking at masked people makes her brain feel as though it's malfunctioning.

"My face, while a body part, is much more than a hand or a foot - it stands in for my whole body, my whole self," she writes.

"In the grocery store I don't recognise my neighbours in their masks. They say 'It's Lynn' or 'It's Julia'. One friend, in a floral mask, after identifying herself, told me her mother had died. I found myself fixating on her eyes. Wetness flooded the whites and pooled at the red edge. Without being able to bring my face close to hers I could not really comfort either of us.

"'We didn't need dialogue,' insists Gloria Swanson in the film Sunset Boulevard, 'we had faces.'"

"Evolutionary biology," Steinke continues, "traces the emotive face from a time before language and links it to the growing complexity of our early social groups. The better early humans were at conveying feelings, the more successful they were at the co-operations that pushed civilization forward. Some scientists have suggested that homo sapiens' greater facility for facial expression is what allowed us to overtake the less facially dexterous Neanderthals. My face is my trademark and my main mode of communication."

And later, "After I end my Zoom class, freezing my students and me mid-expression, I put my laptop to sleep and sit in my chair staring at the dark screen. Sadness blooms in my chest. The small electronic simulacrum of my students' faces never comes close to their living features enlivened by what some people call the soul.

"I literally carry my history on my face," Steinke testifies. "My face, as I age, has become less interesting to men. This is what women mean when they say that they feel invisible. The feeling is not that different from wearing a COVID-19 mask. People on the street don't look at me, don't register my face."

MORE IAN WARDEN:

You wonder if, in these ACT election times, any candidates creating their corflutes thought of being portrayed with a mask on. It might have suggested an admirable degree of social responsibility. But then of course as an advertisement for a candidate, for a statement about any person, the nakedness of face is essential for all the reasons Darcey Steinke says. Candidates' faces, everyone's faces, are their owners' trademark and main mode of communication.

Then, too, although there is no room on a corflute for any printed political message, we surely think, like Gloria Swanson, that faces can say all we need to know. Lots of the candidate corflute faces seem to be saying a lot. Their conversation with me as I beetle along Hindmarsh Drive humanises my commute.

For a project I have under way I have been looking at lots of portrait portrayals of Beethoven. This year is the 250th anniversary of the incomparable man's birth, and with a gazillion honourings of him going on his face is everywhere. And when I said, above, that we might think of extra-political uses of corflutes, the kind of thing I am imagining is an ACT government honouring Beethoven with several thousand portrait-corflutes of him lining our highways rather as, at the moment, those highways are portrait galleries of candidates.

There are many portraits of the striking-looking genius that would work well, copyright permitting. One of my favourites is Daniel Adel's reverent caricature, done for The New Yorker, showing a scowling Beethoven about to thunderously pummel a piano, his famous face and head framed by what seems to be a brain-thundercloud full of the fire and lightning of creative genius. Google can take you to Adel's and others' ripper portraits of Beethoven, and while you're there, imagine them as cityscape-enhancing corflutes attracting to Canberra the rapt admiration of the civilised world.