Testing the Waters of ArtPrize 2014

I don’t know if anyone else here in Grand Rapids feels this way, but ArtPrize feel a little different to me this year. It’s almost as if everything shifted when they announced that this year, for the first time, the juried award would be equal to the voted award. If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m a little bit excited. I now have an expectation that the amount of high quality Art on display will have grown tremendously, and as such will receive much more attention than in previous years.

On the other hand, ArtPrize was originally conceived purely as an open Art competition that relies entirely on public vote. Have we lost confidence in our visitors and their ability to choose the best possible work? I think in some ways we have. For the past five years, the ArtPrize top 10 has been comprised mostly of gimmicky (sometimes even kitschy) artwork that has been displayed in easily accessible public or outdoor spaces located right in the center of the city. Questions have been raised on quality and fairness of location. I myself have serious doubts as to whether or not visitors understand the responsibility that comes with handing out such a large monetary prize.

Still, despite the problems, generally the winners of ArtPrize have been quality pieces of work. (I will note that the winners of the voted prize tend to exclude more conceptual or abstract work in favor of large, highly technical pieces.) I do hope, as ArtPrize continues to grow and change over the years, that we are able to open ourselves up to all kinds of Art, not just relying on the jurors to expand our horizons for us.

As ArtPrize gets started, I really want to encourage those of you in the Grand Rapids area to really consider what pieces you’re voting for. Do they make you think? Do they push you to consider new ideas and possibilities? Do they deserve to win $200,000? Take your time! Look around, not only in exhibition centers but the small shops in the area. Only have a weekend? Plan ahead. Use your time wisely and make your votes count. Talk to the artists if you have the opportunity to do so. Be ready to learn.

If not sure where to start, here are some tips from someone with experience.  If you’re looking for places you can hit in one day, hit up the exhibition centers downtown like the Grand Rapids Art Museum and then wander through the small shops and venues in the surrounding area. If you want whimsey, a lot of the outdoor spaces like the Grand River, Ah-Nab-Awen Park and the area around the Public Museum tend to have some fun things you can interact with. If you want a good variety, DeVos place and the Women’s City Club typically show a lot of different sizes and mediums so you can see a very good mix of Art. For music lovers, St. Cecilia’s has all of the musical entries available to listen to in their basement. And finally, if you’re very adventurous and looking for something to push you out of your comfort zone, check out places like Kendall College of Art and Design, SiTE:LAB, The Meijer Gardens and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, all places that show site specific installations and pieces that push boundaries.

(Image is detail of Walking On Water by Makoto Fujimura, which is on display for ArtPrize 2014 at The Acton Institute.)

Love, Hate, ArtPrize, and the Open Art Competition

It has been my privilege these past few years to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For those of you that aren’t familiar with this lovely city, Grand Rapids is home to the largest public Art competition in the world, ArtPrize. This competition is now in its 6th year and it’s starting this week on Wednesday, September 24. Because of this, I will be attempting to write three times a week for the next three and a half weeks. Yikes.

Since many of you may not live in or near Grand Rapids, here is your introduction. ArtPrize was started in Grand Rapids in 2009 as the brainchild of Rick DeVos. The premise was simple. Anyone can enter as long as you pay the entry fee and connect with a venue. Any business or organization in the general downtown area can sign up to be a venue and display Art. Anyone that attends can sign up to vote for a winner. 4th-10th place winners got $7,000, 3rd got $50,000, 2nd got $100,000 and 1st got a whopping $250,000, the highest award for any Art competition in the world. That first year, 1,200 pieces of Art took over downtown Grand Rapids. Since then, we have seen entries in the Grand River, on several of the bridges, hanging from the tops of buildings and flying over our public parks. Everyone gets involved, including the police station, the Art museum and several area churches. Rules have been changed and things have been added (there are now TWO $200,000 1st prize awards, one for the public vote and one juried) but one thing that sticks is that people flood the downtown area. Just to see Art.

As an artist myself, this makes me pretty happy. I want people to be educated about Art and interested in the discussions surrounding it. And because of ArtPrize, they are! For three and a half weeks every year, Art is on the news and in the streets. People are being exposed to abstract and realist paintings, huge detailed sculptures, conceptual Art, non-traditional art forms,  performance Art, and they are learning in the process. Children in this city are being surrounded by an atmosphere of creativity. I myself have been an ArtPrize volunteer, an ArtPrize artist, and I even applied for an ArtPrize job once. My messenger bag is actually made out of an ArtPrize banner. I LOVE ArtPrize.

But of course nothing is perfect, and when you have an Art competition where the winner is decided by the public, things don’t always turn out the way one might hope. Some venues display Art that is more gimmick than anything else (giant steampunk pigs, bears made of tires, fire breathing dragons, etc.) and many people vote based on spectacle and shock value. Last year, I was particularly disappointed with the top 10 from the public vote, the best of which was the winner, a 4 panel Art quilt of a lakeshore landscape. Then there’s the other problem – the venue problem. People with only a Saturday to spare stick to large exhibition centers, neglecting the smaller shops and fringe venues that may hold hidden gems. When I was an ArtPrize artist, my venue was on the outskirts with no bus routes going by and oddball hours. I worked hard, but no one came. It’s times like that when I really HATE ArtPrize.

This year, the 6th year, I have high expectations. For the first time, the juried award is the same amount as the public vote award. One of my very favorite artists, Makoto Fujimura, will be here from New York City, displaying his piece and giving a lecture. My school will be displaying the work of graduate students during ArtPrize. Art has already started going up and my anticipation is high. On Wednesday, I will be going to see as much of the Art as possible and making note of the best venues, out of the way places to find great Art, the best pieces for discussion and anything else that this year’s round may inspire. I’m excited to share this crazy thing with all of you.

(Sessilanoid by James Peterson, on display at the Grand Rapids Art Museum during ArtPrize 2013. Photo by E. J. Cobb)

Why That Famous Stuff Is Famous Part 5: Pop Art

Pop Art. You probably already know what it is because, by definition, it is popular. (Hint: in case you weren’t sure, the “pop” in Pop Art does in fact stand for popular.) And if I were to ask you to name a famous Pop artist, you would almost always say Andy Warhol. This is because Pop Art gets its potency by utilizing things in our culture that are already popular or recognizable, and Andy Warhol was a master of marketing. But Warhol was not the first on the scene.

We tend to associate Pop Art with the 1960s, especially in the United States. But that’s silly, because it started in the 1950s in the UK. Pop Art actually grew out of Dadaism, borrowing from their ready made items (see last week’s Duchamp post) and collages. One of the first pieces considered Pop Art was a collage by British artist Richard Hamilton. The picture includes company logos, a pin up girl and a body builder. The kinds of work that followed also took inspiration from movie stars, political figures, comic strips, flags, common household goods, even numbers and letters!
This is why this Pop Art movement became so big. Artists were capitalizing on things people already liked. Andy Warhol was especially good at marketing culture as Art, using soup cans and Marilyn Monroe for his prints. His wild personality helped to build his fame as well.
So there you have it! Pop Art was destined to be big just because of where it came from. If you have any interest in finding Pop artists besides Warhol, check out Tom Wesselman, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Roy Liechtenstein to get started!
(Marilyn by Andy Warhol)

Why That Famous Stuff Is Famous Part 4: Fountain

Even if you don’t know the name Marcel Duchamp, you probably know Fountain. It’s this amazing piece of sculpture carved from a solid block of marble that took years… oh no wait… no no, I’m sorry, it’s a urinal. An ordinary urinal, turned on its side and signed with a fake name.

I’m sure it’s not difficult for you to figure out why this is famous. It’s shocking. It’s controversial. It’s… a URINAL. At the time, Marcel Duchamp was a part of something called Dadaism. The people involved in the creation of Dada were responding directly to WWI. They were rebelling against the reason and logic that had lead to “this world of mutual destruction”. They were also rebelling against the traditional notions of what Art should be, seeing it instead as a lens through which we can view and criticize our society and our world.

So in 1917, with Dada as a basis of thought, Duchamp decided to enter an exhibit with this piece of Art that challenges the very notion of Art itself. At the time, Duchamp was a board member for the Society of Independent Artists in New York City. The Society put on an exhibit which advertised that they would display any piece of Art as long as the artist paid the fee. Despite that, the exhibition committee rejected Fountain. Their basis for rejection was that this was not Art at all. Marcel Duchamp promptly resigned in protest.

Shortly after this incident, the New York group of Dadaists responded to the rejection of Fountain. They wrote essays and editorials for their magazine The Blind Man in defense of Fountain. One anonymous editorial stated, “Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.” That choice ended up creating a shift in the Art world from technical skill towards more conceptually focused Art. (What is the underlying meaning of a piece of Art, regardless of what it’s made of or how it is displayed?) This led to the use of ready made items as Art, the tremendously popular Pop Art movement and the advent of performance as Art.

I’ll be the first to admit that Marcel Duchamp is not my favorite artist and Fountain is not my favorite piece of Art. Still, as someone who is aware of the many directions that Art has taken and the things that have led us here, I can’t deny the importance of this controversial sculpture and the place it has in history.

Fountain went on to inspire people like Andy Warhol, who used soup cans, Brillo boxes and bananas in their work, basically building their own fame on the idea that anything can be Art. It allows the artist to be more than just a duplication machine, cranking out landscapes and portraits one after the other. As creative people we can experiment and even strive to say something through the display of objects and images. We can impact politics and philosophy. We can affect change. And all because Marcel Duchamp challenged the boundaries of the acceptable by turning a urinal on its back and calling it Fountain.

Why That Famous Stuff Is Famous Part 3: Vincent van Gogh

If you’re a normal human being, you’ve been waiting to see if I would write one of these “famous” posts on Vincent van Gogh. Because everyone likes Vincent van Gogh. If you’ve ever been to a museum you like Vincent van Gogh. If you’ve seen that episode of Doctor Who (Yeah, you know what I’m talking about… THAT episode.) you like Vincent van Gogh. Some of you may have had a poster of “Starry Night” hanging in your dorm room. (I myself had it on a mouse pad). Even the jaded Art student that publicly claims that there’s nothing special about him… even they like van Gogh.

In my case, Vincent van Gogh was my first Art love. I still have a special place in my heart for him. In high school I wrote a 12 page research paper on him. In high school, I saw my first van Gogh painting in person at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In college, I had the amazing privilege to travel to Paris, visit the Musee d’Orsay, and walk into an entire room full of van Gogh paintings. To this day he remains both familiar and mysterious to me.

So, the basics. Vincent van Gogh was Dutch. He wanted to be a pastor, but as it happened he was very bad at it, so he became an artist instead. (A perfectly valid and logical next step, in my opinion.) He moved to France, because that was where all the Art was happening. He made some artist friends. He got into the bohemian scene and drank absinthe. He made about 2,000 paintings, drawings and sketches in a decade or so. And then he died.

During his life, his artwork was only known to a select few. His brother Theo supported him financially, but never sold any of Vincent’s paintings. In his last two years, Vincent did start to exhibit his work, getting some positive recognition in places like Paris and Brussels. Despite the notice people took, he still only sold one painting during his life. Eventually, his mental and emotional troubles started catching up with him. His brother was having difficulties with his job and he himself was depressed. On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh arrived home with a bullet wound to the stomach. On July 29 he died.

(It has been commonly accepted that Vincent van Gogh committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach while out for a walk. In recent years, a new argument has been made that he did not kill himself, but was shot by some young boys in town by accident. There is convincing evidence for both theories. If you’re curious, I would suggest doing a little research to help you come to your own conclusions.)

When Vincent van Gogh died, his brother Theo inherited all of his work. Vincent’s paintings were getting more notice, and several memorial exhibitions of his work were being displayed. Unfortunately, Theo was never able to fully enjoy this inheritance. Six months after Vincent’s death, Theo van Gogh died. (One doctor said he died of sadness.) Theo’s widow Jo was able to sell all of Vincent’s accumulated work which is now spread all over the world in museums and private collections.

So there you have it. Van Gogh is famous because he died. Ok, not just that though. Truth be told, his paintings express much more than just paint and color. There is depth and emotion conveyed through every single one, but especially in his portraits. The one I’ve shown here is one of my favorites and is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The fact that his first exhibitions captured the attention of critics is a sign that his work was appreciated before his death. I think he still would have been known if he had lived a full and uneventful life, but because of his well-known mental struggles and very sudden death, he drew the attention of the world and became everyone’s favorite artist.

(Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh, 1887)