Word went out yesterday to donors and stakeholders of ArtPrize Dallas that the much-touted art festival will not be coming to Dallas after all. The Grand Rapids-based art event has been exploring expansion into Dallas for about a year, an effort spearheaded locally by former Goss-Michael Foundation associate director Ariel Saldivar. In her rather lengthy letter to supporters, Saldivar accuses Dallas and its philanthropic community of not being ready for an event like ArtPrize.
“Despite the visionary understanding of our supporters, there were a few who saw the concept as threatening to the status quo,” Saldivar wrote. “The resistance was especially disappointing since ArtPrize Dallas would have had a tremendous, positive economic impact. Never the less, we made tremendous progress in this effort, and we truly believe that one day our city will be ready for such an inclusive and unique undertaking, but unfortunately, today is not that day.”
It hasn’t been the best week for ArtPrize. Before the news that the event couldn’t gain traction in Dallas, Gawker published a lengthy report about the Grand Rapids event, calling it “banal” and “far-right.” This kind of criticism is nothing new. Founded by the DeVos family, which owns the Amway Corporation (and as politically active arch-conservatives considered second in power and influence only to Kochs), ArtPrize could be seen as a kind of Amway for art. Shunning the traditional standards and barriers of entry that surround the display of art — museum curators, galleries, etc. — ArtPrize is a kind of free-for-all that allows anyone to enter art work into the festival. The public then votes for the pieces they like the most, and the art with the most votes wins a hefty pay-out.
In 2011, ArtPrize famously wrote a $250,000 check to an artist who painted a picture of Jesus modeled on a California surfer, solidifying its reputation as an art festival that rewards schlock. But since launching with their popular vote model, ArtPrize also added a juried prize in order raise the credibility of the event. Last year Anila Quayyum Agha, who studied at UNT, became the first artist to win both the popular vote and the jury’s praises, suggesting the possibility that ArtPrize could reconcile its populism with critical acumen. That piece, called Intersections, was exhibited at the Dallas Contemporary earlier this year as a lead up to what was supposed to be the first Dallas ArtPrize in 2016.
However, this tension between quality and accessibility is still implicit in the concept of the event, and that may not have gone over with well with Dallas’ philanthropic circles. On the one hand, ArtPrize’s populism bills itself as a way of building awareness and excitement around contemporary art. “If I never hear the fucking word conversation again it’ll be too soon,” was a comment about the festival quoted in a GQ feature about ArtPrize from 2012. The appeal for municipalities is that all this conversation manifests itself in huge crowds, booked hotel rooms, and tourism dollars.
On the other hand, ArtPrize asks us to accept some less-than-stellar-art in the name building awareness around the medium. It seems like a less-than desirable trade off. As we saw with the recent Aurora event, festivals that use art to attract massive crowds and tourism dollars often have difficultly serving the art they supposedly intend to celebrate. The danger with ArtPrize is that it lowers the public’s expectations for and understanding of contemporary art, while celebrating middle-brow taste in the name of the most pandering form of populism.
In conversations with Saldivar over the past year, she rejected this criticism and argued that she would help give ArtPrize a Dallas twist. ArtPrize Dallas wasn’t going to replicate the Grand Rapids model, she said, but it was going to leverage the idea and technology developed in Michigan to launch an event that would drive a spirit of grass roots support for artists and community-wide cultural education. By generating excitement and sponsorship income around the event, Saldivar hoped to redirect resources to Dallas artists who are typically left outside of this city’s philanthropic conversations.
Saldivar was right to point out the gulf between the way Dallas patrons support institutions and artists. This divide between Dallas’ abundant high-level philanthropy and its meager grass roots-level fundraising may be the “status quo” Saldivar is talking about in her letter to supporters. If so, you have to ask another question: Is this kind of imported art event really the right model to challenge that status quo? If Dallas supports a Neiman Marcus approach to culture — willing to pay a premium for a store stocked with wares approved by out-of-town taste makers — would that attitude really be challenged by trying to open a Marshalls?
ArtPrize is a complicated, controversial product, and we don’t know what kind of form it would have taken in Dallas. Is Dallas better or worse off for failing to bring it to town? I’m not sure. My thought was always that ArtPrize Dallas would have been as good the artists who decided to buy into the concept. A certain amount of subversion seemed necessary to make this “buy-in” work, a way to provide ArtPrize with the kind of aesthetic and intellectual friction that could elevate it. In other words, ArtPrize Dallas would have been good for Dallas if enough artists pushed back against it — something that was already starting to happen with Christopher Blay’s tongue-in-cheek ArtSmarter Prize . But at the end of the day, all that cultural warfare sounds exhausting. What Dallas artists really need is more support, not another enemy.
If Dallas doesn’t want to support ArtPrize but also doesn’t like Saldivar’s accusations that we are a city mired in the status quo, then how about some of those philanthropists who worked against ArtPrize come up with a better way to support the artists who live in this city? How about they consider how to offer more support to the artistic activity that doesn’t dwell in their museums and art arcs? How about we come up with a way to elevate our culture, support our artists, expand artistic education, and reach a wider breadth of the community without importing other cities’ ideas, models, and taste?
Now that would truly be a challenge to the status quo.