It provides enough money to live on for the six months of the residency, a substantial award to cover materials, and studio space-which is at something of a premium in Cornwall. Overall, the residency is worth around £25 000, clearly a substantial benefit to the winner. And yet the effect on the local art community is open to serious question.

In order to qualify, an artist must reside in the south west of England and be at a stage in his or her career to reap maximum benefit from the award. This means the candidate must have had sufficient prior national and international exhibition record to represent "a good bet," someone who has already succeeded and is likely to continue.

The first beneficiary of the scheme was Partou Zia, a painter whose work for the residency was inspired by William Blake. The angsty profundity of Zia's painting defies interpretation; arguments as to the quality of the work are pointless: if you don't like, it seems, it because you don't understand it, and if you don't understand it's because you are stupid. If this was a disappointment to the Tate, no one is saying so. If the recent resurgence of interest in William Blake and spirituality creates a market for this kind of work, Zia will certainly benefit from the Tate brand stamp of approval. The arts community in Cornwall, however, certainly will not.

The second recipient of the residency is Ged Quinn, whose series Dystopia is an exercise in discomfort in the painted medium. Huge canvases draw you into neurotic visions of imprisonment: one shows a miniature aerial view of the Maze prison is surrounded by giant blades of exquisitely-painted grass. Another is a tiny gulag in an enormous forest; another, a sanatorium with microbe-shaped flower beds. In many visitor's particular favourite, I like America and America Likes Me, a spaniel-type dog, whose coat forms a map of the United States on his back, fairly convention in style until you notice the enormous pink doggy erection. These are intellectual paintings with highly academic references. But the bizarre scaling and textural oddities allow even the a novice viewer to grasp the paranoia, the sense of injustice in Quinn's images.

Of the two, Quinn's work seems the more accessible, and so the more likely to be of broad benefit to a local community. And yet the scheme as a whole smacks of elitist cronyism: the author of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Zia's work confesses to having known the artist personally long before having examined her work; in an area as small as Cornwall it would hardly be surprising that the director of the Tate moves in the same social circle. Both artists are in same thirty-five plus age group, both are painters and neither is Cornish.

It remains to be seen whether the Tate will choose to continue to use the residency reinforce old patterns of exclusion and privilege, or use its substantial resources and clout to address the problem of producing contemporary art in Cornwall.