hyperallergic.com: Award season now arrives less as a sequence of events than as a continuous atmosphere. Announcements blur into ceremonies, ceremonies into press cycles, press cycles into speculation about the next stage. The art world has begun to mirror this rhythm, producing its own awards, its own stages, its own moments of recognition that appear to consolidate value and, more importantly, authority in real time.
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The MTV example in this essay was what most enlightened me. The VMAs didn't collapse when the culture moved on; they persisted. The Art Basel Awards seem to use a similar model: the fair already is the spectacle; the awards ceremony is the spectacle of the spectacle. This is a performance showcasing certain art’s legitimacy. It’s a system built for capitalism! What the MTV situation shows is that the ceremony can survive the death of its parent institution almost indefinitely, as long as enough institutional players have an interest in treating the art forms as meaningful. Although the artists receiving VMAs are playing a different game than those involved in the Art Basel Awards, the question this article raises is whether artists can afford to stop participating, or whether opting out of visibility (even managed visibility) costs more than it's worth in a field with pretty much no public funding. Spectacle outliving its function isn't exclusive to MTV, It may be the art world's norm now.
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