The Time For Competitive Arts Prizes May Be Over

“All these prizes are, effectively, marketing exercises. That does not make them bad things … Today, though, artists and judges alike are more attuned to the difficulty in choosing ‘the best’ when all artists palpably do not have equal access to the starting lines; when ‘the best’ is a subjective and contingent category; when the authority of all kinds of institutions, and not just cultural prizes, is on the wane; and when artists competing like racehorses feels out of tune with the times in a way that it did not during the more individualistic Thatcher and Blair eras.” – The Guardian