ArtPrize Blog

An Interview with Adam Weinberg

Guest Speaker, Adam Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, interviewed by Nicole Caruth. An excerpt:

Adam Weinberg. Courtesy Artinfo.com. Photo: Patrick McMullan Photography.

Nicole Caruth: When you first heard about ArtPrize, what were your initial thoughts?

Adam Weinberg: I wasn’t sure that the world needed necessarily another art prize, per se, because there are a lot of prizes out there that are given, whether it’s the Whitney’s Bucksbaum Award, the Wexner Prize, the Tate, the Guggenheim or MacArthur. There are so many different kinds. And then there are hundreds of other competitions not on this scale. The question for me was what does this prize do that other prizes don’t? That was my initial reaction.

NC: So what do you think this prize does?

AW: Well I have to say, you’d have to have come to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to actually see what it’s done. I had an interesting conversation with Rick DeVos about this last night, and I said, “You know, to me, the prize is beside the point. It really isn’t the money or the prize, because, in fact, you have 1,200 plus artists here, and almost nobody is going to get a prize.” The point is you have hundreds and hundreds of artists who have given up their lives for a period of time, who have spent huge amounts of money going to incredible energy, expense, and time to create these projects. I think very few of them really believe that they actually have a chance at really winning much of anything, just based on numbers. It’s like a lottery. But they’re here giving their hearts to it. And Rick completely agreed. For him the prize is sort of besides the money. So what I think that the prize has done is that it has become a magnet and an excuse, in a way, to encourage artists to come from all over to create works of art throughout the city: inside, outside, on the river, on tops of buildings, on top of bridges, in fountains. Everywhere you look there are objects, and projections, and performances and the panicle of things. And the scale, I have to say I’m really quite astonished. There is just so much.

When one considers they only started this in April, and they had three months of summer intervening in the middle of this, and it’s now the end of September, just the sheer fact of organizational [achievement], not to mention the number of artists, and venues, and sponsors, and everything — it’s absolutely astonishing.

…When I first got here and I went to the Old Federal Building, and to the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. You see the kind of discreet venues and you say, “It’s very nice and there are some beautiful things and nice exhibitions.” But it’s not until you actually start wondering around the city that you realize this is enormous. It has the scale in terms of the numbers and types of things of a Documenta that takes five years [to organize]. Now, does it have that quality level? I wouldn’t agree that it does. But on the other hand, does it have the sense of scale, scope and ambition in a funny way? Yes.

Documenta came out of a postwar situation, etc. But you have these two towns that are basically not known for very much, in a way, in the middle of the country, where art totally transforms a rather sleepy mid-country city. It’s fascinating.

NC: Yes, I was saying to Paul Moore at ArtPrize that I could write a whole thesis about this event. But I’m just trying to tackle one little piece at a time. Let’s talk more about scale, I think, it is so important in this setting.

AW: As we all know size isn’t everything, [but] you need presence in an urban environment.

…One piece that I found [so far] that had, I thought, some presence and was more successful in terms of its scale was [Project Propagate], where they had recovered all these flowers from cemeteries.

NC: Right, and the flowers kind of cascade down to building?

AW: Yes. There was something both charming and kind of poignant about it, and I like that. It had scale and I think it was, for me, a bit more successful than some of the other large-scale pieces, which I find enjoyable, and there is nothing the matter with enjoyable. I wish I had had my 11-year-old daughter here when I walked around last night, because she would have loved a lot of this. But I don’t know that a lot of the pieces I would necessarily remember — and remember doesn’t just mean that you enjoy, but remember it because it was troubling, disturbing, or questioning, or something profound. So far, at least of the very large scale pieces, [Project Propagate] had that kind of memory for me.

But I’m also struck by this one piece where an artist had made an ice sculpture of a motorcycle. I’m really struck by how ArtPrize has brought forward the aesthetics of the home grown and kind of populist aesthetics, which I’m very enthusiastic about. This kind of collage of all kinds of art practices that one can find throughout the country, or the world for that matter — that to me is kind of fascinating. So that, I think, is very successful.

The other thing I think, too, is that first, when you hear $250,000, it sounds like a lot of money, and it’s a lot of money for an individual artist to get. In fact, it is a lot.

NC: Well, it’s half of the MacArthur, which some artists will work most of their lives before receiving, or before they have a chance at it.

AW: That’s right. But what you realize, and this is the difference, is that for the number of artists that they have brought to this community through that prize, and the activities, and the other venues and money that they have leveraged — $250,000 isn’t even an advertising budget for an arts festival. So if you look at it [that way] the money was not so much.

…I think for a lot of people, they see it as Star Search and that type of thing, which actually, I don’t see it that way. If that is what encourages people to come and gets people involved for the voting and everything, that’s fine. But I actually see it as just money that they put in to invest in the community, to bring people into the community to do arts. And if it manifests itself on the kind of popular notion that seems to be working in reality television these days, so be it.

…I think that the tendency of an event like this is to try to get attention. And so works that are quiet, works that are more reticent, or slow art does not play well in this. And I think actually, interestingly enough, I think that there is a huge vein of what I would refer to as slow art out there in the world that really requires close attention, and quiet, and reflection, none of which is really present in something like ArtPrize. That is not a criticism of ArtPrize. There are different vehicles for different things. A museum is not generally conducive to the kind of energy and activity of an ArtPrize. And therefore, I don’t think, generally thinking, most museums function like that. And so I think that they are complimentary in nature.

But I do think what happens is that generally paintings, prints and drawings tend to suffer in these kinds of events because they don’t play well being in little galleries or store window. It really is about large-scale gestures. So it does mean that there are whole aspects of art thinking and art practice that are, in effect, excluded even if they are here. People don’t, for the most part, pay attention to them or see them.

It’s also that the art fair mentality has just seeped into every part of the art world, where biennials, programs like this, they all have that aspect of art fair.

NC: Over-saturation.

AW: Yes, over-saturation, the idea that people, for the most part, don’t spend a lot of time with anything. They move too quickly. It’s not about contemplation. I think that, for me, is probably the biggest loss in all of this. And I don’t mean ArtPrize, but in the art world in general, is that art takes time. It takes time to make. It takes time to understand and to experience, and we are in a culture that has no patience. What you hope is that events like ArtPrize encourage people who maybe didn’t know they were interested in art to take it to the next level. And I think that is the big challenge. Is somebody who never really thought about art now maybe going to go to an art museum? And I would hope that would be the case.

NC: Do you see danger, or have reservations about the openness of this project, especially as it relates to curation and credentials?

AW: [Voting] is a tool like anything else, and it can be used for good or for bad. I don’t believe that it replaces the larger curatorial judgment. Again, it’s a parallel way of working. There have always been artists who have had huge popular public reputations, and have no serious following within the museum world.

NC: Thomas Kinkade would be my example.

AW: Exactly. But there are many of them; he is the best known. I don’t feel it’s my job as a museum person to deny the world the Thomas Kinkades or the vehicles to create those people. It’s part of culture. Whether it interests me or not, that is a whole other thing. Whether I think it really changes history and culture or leverages ideas in a way that changes paradigms, I don’t know that it does. I’m not interested in the voting, per se, but both the prize and the voting are vehicles to get people involved. That, I think, is really interesting. I’m not breathlessly waiting to see who’s going to win these [prizes] — I’m curious how the general public will respond to it. I’m curious about the cultural phenomenon.