Few would argue that cassoulet — a magnificent French bean-and-sausage stew, slow-simmered — doesn't earn its stripes over its processed, unfortunately named American cousin, beanie-wienies.

But the high/low cultural dichotomy can be more about trends or origins than about quality. Latter-day gourmets legitimized cassoulet, once deemed lowbrow peasant fare. And the art world's dirty secret is that an old-school, arguably classist primacy of "high," over craft-based, art still reigns. Media with utilitarian origins can't quite escape their residual stain.

Case in point: printmaking, which critic Ken Johnson recently labeled "not a medium of choice for many of today's most interesting artists."

The western preference for paintings over prints may boil down to ideas about originality. Although handmade prints are original works of art, printmaking is an art of "multiple originals": small editions of single images, printed mechanically or hand-pressed.

Painting, an art of singular originals, connotes larger-than-life mystique: Jackson Pollock's cowboy swagger through an upper-crust soiree, cockiness justified by tortured genius. (Physicist Richard Taylor has even analyzed Pollock's layered "drips" and found perfect fractals; each, like a snowflake, carries a uniquely brilliant signature.)

It's almost enough to make a printmaker shovel a Rockefeller-sized pit of self-doubt.

Island residents can judge the print's worthiness for themselves at the Honolulu Printmakers 78th Annual Exhibition at the Academy Art Center. Juried by University of California-Santa Cruz lecturer Paul Rangell, the show provides a glimpse into what's being done statewide by printmakers who made the cut.

Lauded as an excellent opportunity for emerging and established artists alike, juried exhibitions also are frequently critiqued for high entry fees, myopic aesthetics and, should jurors select close friends or former students, poor ethics. Unlike many locally juried exhibitions, the Printmakers' show recruits a nonlocal juror — a healthy cross-pollination, though no guarantee against such pitfalls.

Outside jurors' perceptions of places understood or romanticized through lore can prove deleterious, as well. A juror descending on the American West, for example, might project their own cultural expectations onto the selection process, reinforcing regional stereotypes and provincialism.

Of his choices here, Rangell remarks, "A resounding sense of identity, an enduring tale of a complex group that encompasses many cultural tributaries, is the thread that binds these prints."

Given the show's overwhelming preponderance of historic Hawaiiana imagery, Asiatic woodblock prints and depictions of regional flora and fauna, one wonders if some works that defied expectation — and so missed that thread — were overlooked.

Many selected works are more modernist than contemporary, some bearing a dated collage aesthetic derivative of 1950s purified abstraction. The exhibition design doesn't add much verve, with static rows of midsize prints and few shifts in scale.

That said, the show includes a number of fine works by artists doing their own thing. Jared Wickware's engraving, "Life Class," displays facility and humor. Michael Sweitzer's equally quirky lithograph, "Coming Down," and an untitled intaglio by Connie Frej, command presence. And Duncan Dempster's minutely drawn, untitled intaglio in red ink explores print media's potential for mark-making, an aesthetic under-represented in this exhibition.

Also impressive are large-scale works by Jeera Rattanangkoon and Charles Cohan. Cohan's show-stopper intaglio, "Terrarium IV," proves that size matters — when the content can bear its weight. The seamed triptych spins images of containment into a conversation formally and conceptually smart, a visual lyricism recalling Romantic ideals of the self and its post-fall-from-grace longing.

The show's overall selection seems somewhat skewed to hybrid and splinter print media, such as controversial digital and photographic techniques. The prevalence of monoprints, a hybrid more painterly than printerly, implies a certain envy of the singular "original." And the presence of so many photogravures begs the question: While ink on paper lends depth to the photographic image, if a printmaker adds little content, how is it different, essentially, than a photograph?

Which brings us back to that bothersome business about origins. In Asia, the print boasts a venerable history dating back to the 2nd century A.D. Yet prints on paper first made the western art scene in the 15th century, popularly as cheap reproductions of famous paintings — mere copies, not the "real thing."

Some innovative printmakers, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Kiki Smith, have earned marquee names, alternately embracing and shedding prints' populist skin, and resisting tidy categorization. But they are a minority.

Part of the trouble may be printmaking's technically demanding methods, which can incline artists to sublimate content and rely instead on the safety of a knowable process.

Several exhibition artists stretch their media's potential by incorporating new materials or recycling old ones. Judith Nelson's integration of seed pods and Vince Hazen's paste of dead fruit flies on a screen-printed pineapple add textural and conceptual layers.

Most daring is veteran printmaker Allyn Bromley's sculptural self-portrait, "Language of Doubt," a (Joseph) Cornellian bird's nest of unsold screen prints. The artist reprinted her old prints on reverse with words suggesting revision, then shredded and tangled them into a prone figure, enraptured and trapped by its own obsessions.

Bromley's witty quagmire suggests that the resurrection of the print itself may depend upon those printmakers willing to dwell in doubt.

Freelance writer Marie Carvalho covers art and literature.