In Grand Rapids, a $250,000 prize depends on the will of the voting public. (Story here) Update: Brooklyn painter Ran Ortner won first prize, here, via C-Monster.
In California I think (hard to know from the Web site), Balsa Man offers Tiny Art Grants. A panel of experts God-knows-who selects the winners, who get from $1 to $20 to help them make art that is suitably diminutive.
In Seattle, Vital 5 Productions gives away money in $500 increments that are rigorously random and named for clarity’s sake the Arbitrary Art Grants.
Artists and their fellow-travelers turn out for all three. The Arbitrary Art Grants are economic Dada. The Tiny Art Grants are a satire on (big, bigger biggest-best) Burning Man. In Michigan, there’s an assumption that the people know best.
Who could endorse that premise? And yet, when I took issue with it in Seattle, predicting failure, the end result in the rat-infested shadow of a bridge proved to be a landmark, forcing a recant. (Time to eat troll)
Image via
Meh. There are all sorts of high-profile decisionmaking processes which don’t hold up under much thought about their logical basis or internal rigor. To pick just one example currently in the news the Nobel Peace Prize selections have honestly no meaningful process behind them. The selecting body is simply five random Norwegian members of parliament chosen by that small nation’s prime minister by fiat, and they are not in practice bound by Alfred Nobel’s instructions nor by any other set of criteria.
On the one hand such a silly process guarantees that the choices made will, um shall we say be highly variable in terms of critical thought (can you say Kissinger? Arafat? de Klerk? meanwhile Gandhi was ignored). But then again one could argue that willingness to tolerate such fuzziness is in the big picture one glory of the messy/noisy/rambling/disputatious version of society that the West broadly shares; that we accept a certain amount of silliness as the price of now and then also stumbling into the sublime. As you saw perhaps with the grantmaking process in Seattle, which does sound pretty damned silly but on the other hand the troll looks pretty cool and I want to see him in person.
Perhaps in art grantmaking as in peace prizemaking as in so many other things, Churchill is still right: democracy is the second-worst way for human beings to govern themselves, with all the other options being tied for first.