Art Contests & Awards

by Charlie Goetz

One of the oddities about American attitudes toward art is our tendency to cram works into non-relelvant competitions.  The most conspicuous are the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys.  Talk about comparing apples and oranges! 

The Tonys and Emmys try to break things down into categories of "likes," but even so judges are forced to choose among radically different, ultimately incomparable entries.  "Juried" events involving visual arts go down the same erroneous path.  It's kind of like asking parents to pick a favorite child.  In your heart you might have one, but you surely don't set such a preference out there as any kind of gospel. 

The urge to subject art works to win/lose games is probably tied to the idea that artistic activity should be subject to market forces, a notion belied by the European tradition of patronage, underwriting that brought powerful religious subjects powerfully forward for our continuing admiration. 

Some years ago, a librettist friend invited my daughter and me to a premiere performance of an opera for which he had supplied the words.  The event went well and Charlie was taking bows along with the composer and conductor. 

Susan said, "He's famous, isn't he?" 

"If you read Opera News, you know who he is," I replied.

"How come he's not rich?" she asked. 

I explained that because of its demands, opera would always have to be a subsidized art.  'Boheme' can't be run in the same way as Sound of Music; the performers' voices couldn't take a Broadway regimen.    You can't run an opera production long enough to make a profit for investors. (Ezio Pinza's South Pacific contract sharply limited his singing time per performance.)  

Things might be less uphill for artists in the U. S. if we better understood that art, because of its exploratory and pioneering nature, must be free of the standard capitalistic market forces that govern almost all other aspects of our lives. (G. B. Shaw's devil--in the 'Don Juan in Hell' segment of Man and Superman--notes that most of our inventions could have been wrought by a "greedy dog"... "if he had wanted money rather than food.")  Shackling artistic inventions to supply-and-demand systems threatens to geld the creative process.   

Eventually the painting might sell for ten figures, but in all likelihood not until after the artist is long gone, maybe having starved to death. 

Capitalism has its limits, and if we don't understand them, we end up richer, maybe, as "animals" but considerably poorer as human beings.