Eyes on the Prize: Day 1
Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.
In less than 12 hours in Grand Rapids, I saw more artwork than I usually do in a month’s time in New York City. It’s not that there’s more to see here, but that I’m making an effort to see everything—all 1,262 artists at 159 venues spread across 3-square miles.
As I wandered the streets of downtown and crept around Twitter on opening night, people were buzzing with excitement about ArtPrize. One comment struck me as being spot on: “Unless bad art wins, this will prove to be a monumental event for years to come.” At the risk of sounding like an art snob, I arrived expecting that the majority of ArtPrize entries would fall under the umbrella of “bad art.” And indeed some works are so poorly executed that even calling them art is a stretch. (It’s probably good that I’m not voting.) The blessing and the curse of this open call is that every artist, regardless of the quality or content of their work, is given a chance. Good, brilliant, fair, kitsch and downright atrocious share the same context and sometimes hang side-by-side. Without experts to weed out the good from the bad, it seems to me, that in many cases the better objects suffer. That said, my opinion will not go far in this competition.
At the time of this writing, over 10,000 people have registered for ArtPrize and cast more than 5,700 votes. Voter registration sites are still receiving excited constituents. Though reports have stated that artists in the community were displeased with the idea of a popular vote, the heap of promotional materials that filled my purse last night suggest that they have come to terms with the idea and figured out how to work it. Every artist is a salesman. Street campaigns range from a painter quietly distributing postcards from her garden wagon to the spectacle of moving balloon sculpture accompanied by cries of “Vote for me!” (Given all that there is to do and see, the latter actually seems like a smart move.) Still, there is one lingering concern about voting that I’ve heard on several occasions: the option to vote down. “Playing favorites [voting up] is fine, but voting down is kind of telling people they’re not good enough,” said a volunteer at the West Michigan Center for Arts & Technology (WMCAT). Artist Andrea Misch, whose silicone dolls are on display at Tanaz Hair Boutique Downtown, also worried about voters being “mean.” But as viewers circled us and gushed over her dolls, Misch expressed that she’s no longer concerned.
While I might sound something like the grumbling Simon Cowell of American Idol, there’s a lot of Paula and Randy in me too: even I had a moment of uneasiness about down votes. How is that fair? These votes, I’ve learned, are not included in the final tally, but used to show which artists are creating the most discussion or controversy. Coincidentally, many of these artists are also having their moment in the top 50. I might be jumping the gun, but judging from the list of top ranking works after day one, I’m inclined to believe that the collective public might be just as discerning an audience as a group of so-called experts. (This is in fact James Surowiecki’s theory in The Wisdom of Crowds, a book that inspired the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Click!: A Crowd Curated Exhibition.) With any luck, the Grand Rapids crowd will, as they say on American Idol, “get it right.”
