TT: A piano, a camcorder, and a competition

The Van Cliburn Foundation has just announced a new competition for amateur pianists, the Cliburn YouTube Contest, whose participants post videos of their piano playing. The winner will receive $2,000 and be automatically entered in the next face-to-face Cliburn Amateur Competition, to be held in 2011. It’s a great gimmick, one that’s bound to attract attention–but will it be good for those pianists who choose to participate? That’s the subject of my latest “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s a sample.
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Fifty years ago next month, a 23-year-old whiz kid from Texas won the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, instantaneously becoming America’s best-known classical musician and earning a hatful of money in the process. Van Cliburn, then as now a generous man, thereupon started his own piano competition, hoping to give other gifted young artists the same opportunity that the Tchaikovsky Competition had given him. Mr. Cliburn hasn’t played regularly in public since 1978, but the Van Cliburn Competition is still doing business in Fort Worth, and it’s celebrating the anniversary of his Cold War triumph by launching a new venture that would have been unthinkable in 1958: the Cliburn YouTube Contest, in which amateur pianists over the age of 35 shoot videos of their own playing and upload them to the Cliburn Foundation’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/vancliburnfoundation, where computer-savvy music lovers will view them and pick a winner….
So far as I know, the Cliburn YouTube Contest is the first such event of its kind, but the Cliburn Foundation has been holding amateur competitions since 1999. Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ senior art critic, was one of the finalists that year, and his participation, not surprisingly, brought the competition a fair amount of press coverage. I expect that the YouTube Contest will have the same effect–as well it should. It is an idea so self-evidently ingenious that your immediate response will probably be to wonder why nobody ever thought of such a thing before.
I have less clear-cut feelings about the Amateur Competition itself, however. Seven years ago I sat on the jury for a jazz piano competition, and came away as dubious about the virtues of artistic competitions as I’d been when I started. Does it really advance the cause of art to treat musicians, painters or novelists as if they were beauty-pageant contestants? Very likely not–but such undertakings will always be with us, for there is something in the nature of head-to-head competition that audiences find inherently exciting. That’s why I agreed to serve as a judge: I thought it my duty to see how the process worked in practice. Yet I still felt equivocal about what I was doing. In a race, somebody always comes in first; in art, nobody does. Why, then, encourage amateurs to put themselves through the wringer of a high-profile competition? Might the experience diminish their passion for the artistic endeavors to which they freely devote such big chunks of their lives?
That Van Cliburn should be lending his name to the YouTube Contest is ironic, for he is one of the saddest examples of the damage that can be done to a serious artist who unexpectedly hits the celebrity jackpot….
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Read the whole thing here.