New Artists' Fellowships: It's Not What You Do, It's Who You Know

I'm all for artists' grants: I started my career in cultural journalism at an artists-rights rag, The Art Workers News (where one of my even younger co-workers was a cheerful student who grew up to be an art museum director, the Whitney's Adam Weinberg). I'm in favor of any program that provides financial support to help artists do their work and I thought it was a dark day when the National Endowment for the Arts' grants for individual artists were terminated.

But let's not confuse the newly announced United States Artists grant program with the late, lamented NEA largesse. Anyone could apply for an NEA fellowship, and many established artists later credited those early dispensations with giving them the funds and notice they needed to launch their careers when they were nobodies.

By contrast, the United States Artists program perpetuates the Catch-22 of the artworld: To begin to establish a viable career as a serious artist, you need to know at least one mover-and-shaker, but it's hard to network with those players unless you've begun to establish a viable career.

To be considered for a $50,000 United States Artists grant, artists must first be nominated by one of the more than 150 anonymous "arts leaders, critics, scholars and artists" tapped for this task. (Filmmaker John Waters outted himself, in a NY Times interview, as one of the nominators.) Finalists are chosen from the nominees by a discipline-specific, peer-review panel (shades of the NEA).

This year there are 362 nominated artists; at least 50 will get the money. Ranging in age from 21 to 100, they include everyone from basketmakers to fashion designers to folk-music composers to poets. Some 109 are vying for awards in the visual arts (including performance).

The names of the peer panelists (but not the nominators) will be announced on Dec. 4, along with the names of the grantees. It will be interesting to learn who the gatekeepers are.