ArtPrize- Have YOU Heard About It?

ArtPrize - Sep. 23 - Oct. 8, 2009 - Grand Rapids, MI

Eyes on the Prize: The Future of ArtPrize
October 2nd, 2009

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.


Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Sept. 23, 2009. Photo: N. Caruth

There’s still so much to write about ArtPrize, but the time has come for me to say goodbye. By the time you read this I’ll probably be passing through Detroit on my way back New York. I leave you with some general thoughts, hopes, ideas, and suggestions for the future (at times knowingly contradicting myself):

Don’t try to define art. Something or someone will always get left out that shouldn’t be.

Don’t complain about there being too much art to see. There’s too much of everything right now — ArtPrize reflects our larger culture. Too much art is a good problem to have.

Don’t let the conversation stop with ArtPrize. Keep it going year round. The discourse is larger than any one event. More talk will (hopefully) lead to more informed votes next year.

For sure, there is a direct relationship between location and votes. I don’t know if that’s something that can (or should be) solved by ArtPrize.

Artists: Now you know what you’re up against, so do what you do best and be more creative. Turn it up a notch (without compromising your craft or message), collaborate with other artists, and win this thing next year. As one artist commented this week, “If you can’t beat them join them.” Start planning for 2010 now.

Winning is not everything. I applaud artists who recognized from the beginning that ArtPrize is about more than the popular vote and prize money.

I’ve followed the top 25, 50, … lists since day one, and some days I’ve appreciated having them as a gauge. But they are indeed distracting. I hope ArtPrize will hold these numbers back next year until voting ends. I am certain the conversation around the event will sound quite different.

Criticism is valuable and necessary, but so is enthusiasm. Og Mandino said: “Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no mater how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles.”

There’s been a lot of talk about conventional exhibitions and events that ArtPrize should model itself after in order to enter the “serious” art world. Don’t look to the ivory towers, make those people look at you. They need change more than ArtPrize.

An event like ArtPrize would be extremely difficult for most museums to pull off, because of the bureaucracy of institutions and “high brow” thinking that governs all that they do. Grand Rapids is lucky to have a free agent like Rick DeVos that has taken an interest in art. (I swear he did not pay me to say that.)

Embrace your inner circus/state fair and set up cotton candy and ice cream stands. Offer a food map next year (with bakeries in bold). Okay, that’s totally  selfish.

There is always room for improvement. But, all suggestions aside, I fear that ArtPrize will make too many changes in years to come and start to look like another art fair or biennial. We don’t need any more of those — they push communities out more often than they bring them in. What makes ArtPrize radical and  fresh is its openness. I hope you don’t lose that.


Thank you Grand Rapids, Paul Moore, Rick DeVos, Bill Holsinger-Robinson, Jeffrey Meeuwsen, and everyone else at ArtPrize for having me. I can hardly wait to see what happens next year.

Posted by Nicole Caruth in General

4 Responses to “Eyes on the Prize: The Future of ArtPrize”


Jordana Dickinson says:
October 2, 2009 at 3:55 pm

It has been great to have you blogging about Artprize Nicole. I feel totally honored just to be a apart of this awesome competition. Even though I didn’t make it in the top 100 I am already energized and am working on my project for AP 2010. Go Artprize:)

Kim Boynton says:
October 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm

I agree…we don’t want ArtPrize to become like other “high brow” art events. I also agree that venue may have played too large a role, but clearly 1200+ pieces needed a lot of space. Love the state fair/food map addition…maybe I should open a downtown bakery before next year.

This event reflected our city’s culture very well…homey with a little bit of sophistication! It makes me proud to be a Grand Rapidian. I applaud Rick and his crew for giving our city the most fun I’ve seen in a very long time! I know there are those already plotting for next year and I am excited for what is to come (and it isn’t even over yet).

Heather Miller says:
October 2, 2009 at 4:10 pm

I really agree with what you have to say here. Thank you for writing it.

Kristen Roberts says:
October 2, 2009 at 5:12 pm

You know…I’m not sure I’d change a thing. This felt fresh and young and surprising–you seriously never knew what you were going to see. Rock on, ArtPrize!

This has been one incredible event and nowhere have I seen, read or heard that ANYONE else is reporting about this cultural happening outside of Grand Rapids, MI. Why IS that? If you have heard about the 2009 ArtPrize (an event that has some history in other states, in previous years!)_ leave a comment! I would like to build national momentum in favor of ArtPrize traveling the country, popping up all over the place for the benefit of artists in their communities, AND communities also!!

Favored Dark Horse of Art Prize, Grand Rapids 2009, Public Cultural Event!

Sorry, Young Kim
October 2nd, 2009

If you are following ArtPrize on Twitter, you may have noticed the new hashtag #sorryyoungkim.

The creation of that hashtag comes from an outpouring of affection for one artist and grief he did not make it into the Top 10. It is one of the most remarkable stories from the first week of ArtPrize, how Young Kim from North Carolina went from obscurity to the talk of the event over the course of a few days.



Young Kim is showing his piece, salt & earth, at 47 Commerce SW. It’s a beautiful, vacant one story space that is perfectly situated for the piece. However, it’s perfectly situated in the middle of a mass of construction. Roads are closed and construction crews are working on the block to the north, to the south, to the east and to the west. As traffic flow goes, it’s a venue in quarantine. Add to that Young Kim is not here promoting himself like so many other artists are, and you start to see the odds were stacked against him from the beginning.

But the piece speaks for itself.

Saturday night, I went to 47 Commerce around 9:30PM. There were maybe five other people in there, but whispers had begun that it was something to check out. Sunday, Brian Kelly posted the video embedded above and the buzz about Young Kim started to catch fire on Twitter and Facebook. Monday came with cold weather, rain and high winds battering the city. That evening, one of my coworkers walked over to 47 Commerce in the rain and said it was packed out.



Above, you can see the flow of votes for the front runner (unnamed here) next to votes for Young Kim during each day of the week. Kim’s votes trickle in while the front runner starts strong. Then, when the cold and rain hit the city, the front runner plummets while Kim holds the line. The final 24 hours was an all out sprint. And if it’s any consolation, Young Kim, it was very close.

Over the next week, a lot of stories will be told about the Top 10. For the tens of thousands who have come to ArtPrize, I hope you take the opportunity to dig around and find pieces like Young Kim’s that are tucked away all over the city.

Listen to Michigan Public Radio’s story on Young Kim (and Tanglefoot) today during All Things Considered and here.

Posted by Paul Moore in General

It's like discovering the work of Wolfgang Laib, and the moment everyone realized that Maya Lin, a young architect student from Yale, was winner of the Vietnam Memorial!!

You have a career Young Kim and there are no apologies needed for THAT. Congratulations!!

This incredible event just in, from art:21!

ArtPrize: An Experiment in Decentralized Curation and Competition
August 27th, 2009
by Kevin Buist, ArtPrize

Maya Lin’s (Season One) “Ecliptic” in Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Production still from the Art:21 episode, Identity, © Art21, Inc. 2001.)

There’s been a fair bit of talk lately about how the recession is affecting artists, the art market, and art institutions. And with good reason, pocket books are tight everywhere, and most art, no matter its intended relation to market forces, can’t exist without some kind of capital. It’s not a coincidence that this is also the era of the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, and the like are facilitating massive realtime networks that are free (as long as you’re connected). These networks become a conduit of exchange for new kinds of goods, and value is now being measured in new ways. Stock prices still matter, but Google rankings are starting to matter, too. Content is aggregated by algorithms that calculate value from the unconscious input of millions of users.

How does this new method of exchange and valuation affect the art world? If social networks naturally become markets, placing value on instantly exchanged bits of info, what would happen if we gave that value a monetary correlation, apart from a traditional marketplace? I’ve been working to help develop an new art event that seeks to do exactly that. ArtPrize is a radically open art competition. The annual event will run September 23 to October 10 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hundreds of artists from around the world have created online profiles, which are a cross between an artist bio and an open-ended proposal. Hundreds of property owners, institutions, and public spaces in downtown Grand Rapids have volunteered to open their space to artists. We’ve built ArtPrize.org to enable these artists and venues to connect to one another, without a central curator or jury. If that weren’t unorthodox enough, the winner of the cash prize (currently the world’s largest, at $250,000, with additional prizes for the rest of the top ten) will be decided by public vote. Anyone can come to Grand Rapids, register to vote for free, and rank each entry with either an up or a down vote, online or by text message.

ArtPrize is an experiment that seeks to utilize the connectivity that social networking allows to build an art event from the ground up. We could have made an online art contest, where everyone uploads a .jpg and users click to vote while in their pajamas. We did not want to do that. We believe that the true value of most works of art are experienced during a physical or social encounter. Incentivizing these encounters in the city of Grand Rapids has tremendous civic value. Artists are tuning in to the possibilities inherent with this level of direct engagement with the city and audience. There are exciting projects coming that push the boundaries of how art interacts with social structures, architecture, and an overall sense of place.
Jimmy Kuehnle, ArtPrize participant. Stuffed Full, installation in Kyoto, Japan, 2008.

For those who can’t make it to Grand Rapids this fall, there will still be plenty of ways to track the event online. During the first round of voting, which takes place in the first week, visitors to ArtPrize.org will be able to track which artists are taking the lead. On October first, the top ten from the general vote will be announced, and final the winners will be announced October 8, after the second round of voting. To keep up during the event, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our blog. It’s important to us that the event is grounded in a physical location, but we’re also eager to see how the discussion spurred by ArtPrize spreads across the web.

The idea of an incentive is central to ArtPrize. The prize and the vote primarily do one thing: they deliver an engaged audience. To many, this is a scary prospect. Who are all these people, and what do they know about art? Who are they to say what’s good and what isn’t? The voting audience will certainly be diverse, ranging from experts to complete novices. The event will likely create a vacuum of critical art knowledge, people may not have the language, or the art-historical context, to process what they’re seeing. The great thing is that this vacuum can be perfectly filled by educators, artists, and critics. Experts work tirelessly to supply cultural capital, we’re looking to create a demand. We’re working to produce educational programming and resources, but we’re really excited to see what pops up on its own. How will artists advocate for their own works? How will critics make an argument for what should get votes and what shouldn’t? What happens when friends go to the bar after looking at art and argue about what they voted for and why?

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project, shown above from the June 2009 installation in Toronto, will come to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. (Photo by Flickr user inastral.)

ArtPrize has been the target of some criticism, and that’s not surprising. Some assume that putting on an art contest without a jury is a referendum against traditional art world practices, or even an affront to the very idea of curation. This is not the intent. Curators, juries, galleries, and other art institutions are playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.

There are two interrelated questions that drive much of the thinking behind ArtPrize. One, how do works of art create and maintain value given the current state technological and cultural progress? This is a question Walter Benjamin began to ask with his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. We’re way beyond the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but new versions of the same question keep coming up. And the second question, who decides what that value is? What, or who, is the art world, if such a thing can be concretely defined? And who is the public? How do social media technologies, with their ability to level all users to a single node in a network, affect these distinctions? ArtPrize doesn’t claim to know the answers to these questions, but we are doing everything we can to energize the debate.

Kevin Buist is an artist, freelance writer, and Director of Artist Relations for ArtPrize, he lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. He received a BFA from Calvin College, and attended the New York Center for Art and Media Studies. He has written about film for SpoutBlog and co-produced FilmCouch, a Webby-nominated podcast. Before helping launch ArtPrize, he ran Calvin College’s 106 Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. He can be found on the web at kevinbuist.com and on his blog, The Porcupine School of Poetry.


How might you reproduce this idea in your community?