May the best artist win. Or the one with the most votes.
You have to admit, it’s quite a pitch.
Become The People’s Artist. Win US$25,000. Appear in Artforum. Exhibit your work at The Art of Elysium’s Salon in Los Angeles. And have Johnny Depp invite you along for the ride.
For an emerging or independent artist trying to get their work noticed, there are far worse propositions landing in the inbox. Thousands of artists entered, their friends, families and followers voted, and along the way a lot of money was raised for charity.
So far, so good. Then we went down the rabbit hole.
One free vote, another for $1
The People’s Artist wasn’t a conventional juried art competition. There was no panel of curators, critics or other art professionals sitting around a table arguing over technique, originality or ideas.
Instead, the public decided.
Supporters could cast one free vote each day. They could also make donations that generated additional votes, effectively at a rate of US$1 per vote. At times, the competition offered promotions such as double votes for donations, while artists progressed through successive rounds with votes resetting as the field narrowed.
And art isn’t the first subject to receive this treatment. Variations of the same competition model have previously been used to find a favourite chef, America’s favourite pet, the greatest baker, Mr & Ms Health & Fitness, Super Mom and America’s favourite couple. The People’s Artist is the art-world incarnation of an already well-established formula.
That creates an interesting definition of The People’s Artist, because once donations generate additional votes, we’re no longer measuring just how many people prefer one artist’s work over another. We’re also measuring how effectively an artist can mobilise an audience and how much that audience is prepared to spend.
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Not entirely, and this is where the story becomes more interesting than shouting scam and moving on.
The competition was also a fundraiser benefiting The Art of Elysium, a Los Angeles-based charity that uses art and creativity in programmes supporting people experiencing difficult circumstances. According to The Art Newspaper’s investigation, The People’s Artist raised more than US$6.8 million for The Art of Elysium.
That’s real money capable of doing real things, and fundraising costs money. Professional fundraisers aren’t inherently sinister because they get paid. On the surface, everyone wins. The charity gets funding, the competition operator gets paid, artists get exposure, supporters get involved and one artist walks away with US$25,000.
Except there’s another question. What exactly was being rewarded?
The winner, mixed-media artist Gregory Bedford, reportedly spent eight consecutive weekends creating videos and social-media content to encourage people to support his campaign. At one point, according to The Art Newspaper, he asked followers to donate US$25 to help keep him in first place.
There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, anyone running a gallery would be foolish to pretend that an artist’s ability to communicate, engage an audience and tell their story doesn’t matter. We spend a considerable amount of time doing exactly that.
But that isn’t the same thing as assessing the art.
An artist with 100 passionate supporters willing to donate for additional votes could potentially outperform an artist whose work might be extraordinary but who has little social-media presence, hates making videos and couldn’t persuade their mother to click a link.
Perhaps that’s democracy. Perhaps it’s marketing. Perhaps it’s fundraising. It’s probably a little of all three.
But is it an art competition?
No more stuffy judges
Colossal chief executive Mary Hagen offered an interesting defence of the model. She argued that one of the attractions of the competition is precisely that there is “no stuffy judging panel” deciding subjectively that one person’s art is better than somebody else’s.
There is something appealing about that argument. The art world certainly isn’t short of gatekeepers, and history has provided plenty of examples of experts spectacularly failing to recognise artists who later became important.
But removing the gatekeepers doesn’t remove subjectivity. It simply changes the gate.
Instead of convincing a curator, critic or jury, artists have to convince enough people to vote for them, and potentially convince some of those people to donate for additional votes. Money doesn’t disappear from the equation; it just enters through another door.
And then there’s Artforum
This might be our favourite part of the rabbit hole.
One of the headline prizes was the opportunity to “appear in Artforum Magazine”. The competition website doesn’t exactly play down what that means, emphasising Artforum’s influence across museums, institutions, collectors and the wider art world.
Appearing in Artforum sounds significant. And it could be.
But according to The Art Newspaper, Artforum’s editors confirmed that Bedford’s appearance will be a paid advertisement, with the editorial team having no involvement.
That’s a rather important distinction. An advertisement in Artforum is still an appearance in Artforum, but being advertised in an influential art publication and being selected editorially by that publication are two very different forms of recognition.
The words may technically work. The impression they create is another matter.
So who is The People’s Artist?
Maybe the answer is Gregory Bedford. He entered according to the rules, built an audience, motivated his supporters and ultimately won the competition. None of that should be taken away from him. And the competition has raised an extraordinary amount of money for The Art of Elysium.
But the bigger question isn’t really about the winner. It’s about what we increasingly mean by recognition.
Social media has already blurred the boundaries between artistic merit, visibility and popularity. An artist can now build an international audience without waiting for a gallery, critic or curator to give them permission, and we think that’s a good thing.
But replacing one gatekeeping system with a system in which social reach and money can determine who advances isn’t the same thing as removing gatekeepers altogether.
And that may be the most interesting thing about The People’s Artist. It doesn’t settle the old argument about who gets to decide what constitutes good art. It creates a new one.
If artistic recognition can be won through votes, and some of those votes can be bought, what exactly are we voting for?
Until the next one...
Blair & El xoxo