I know how this looks: it looks as if I am fixated on prizes in the arts. Really, I’m not — it just happens that I’ve either run across or been told about some noteworthy ones lately. And I am, if not fixated, certainly interested in strategies and tactics that encourage people to appreciate the arts.
So here’s a prize I like: The Saatchi Gallery-Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools — which just announced its shortlist of finalists.
The London newspaper launched the prize last May, with these words:
Whether traditional drawing and painting, whether it is work that falls into the messy or the precise schools, whether it is sculptural or digital, art is an expression of creative skills, and they are skills that The Sunday Telegraph would like to encourage among our schoolchildren.
The paper decided to team up with the Saatchi Gallery, which it said already had an education program, to start a partnership designed to “promote art and encourage artists of the future.” Students up to 18 years old, worldwide, could enter, with the deadline being Aug. 28.
Since then, a panel — artists Antony Gormley and Peter Blake, Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Sunday Telegraph’s art critic, Ekow Eshun, the artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Camilla Batmanghelidjh, CEO of Kids Company — has assessed the entries.
Winning produces two prizes, one to the artist and one to his or her school.
For the first prize, the winning school’s art department will receive £10,000 and the winning student will receive £2,000 “to be spent on art and computer equipment.” For the two runners-up, the schools will win £5,000 each, and the winning students each receive £1,000. As another incentive, the winning entries will be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery and in The Sunday Telegraph.
Win-win-win for everyone. Though I don’t know of a parallel study in the visual arts, a few years ago I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about reseach that analyzed attempts by orchestras to cultivate audiences (also available here). It found:
The research showed that predicting who will buy tickets is difficult, except for one variable: 74% of ticket-buyers had played an instrument or sung in a chorus somewhere, sometime, in their lives.
So, if the visual arts world can encourage young people to draw, paint, sculpt, etc., they may well be breeding future audiences.
But back to prize in London: The newspaper (here) and the Saatchi Gallery have also showing some works during the competition on a rotating basis.
Names on the shortlist, published in The Sunday Telegraph this weekend, won’t mean anything to Real Clear Arts readers, so I won’t publish them, but here’s the link to the article and the gallery of finalists. Most are from the U.K., but there’s one each from the U.S., Italy, Palestinian Territory and three from South Korea. There are three 8-year-olds and three 9-year-olds on the shortlist.
Given the state of newspapers here, I can’t see an exact parallel happening. But why not others? Why not a partnership between the Art Institute of Chicago, say, or the Whitney Museum, and Gagosian Gallery? Or why not a corporate partner, like Macy’s, which has room at stores around the country to display art? It would be great to publish the entries, on a running, and maybe USA Today could be enlisted for that.
Arts educators, over to you — you can start this ball rolling.
Photos: Insanity, by Sam, aged 17, Rolette Public School, U.S. (top), untitled work by Brandi Stovall, aged 18, Cresskill School, N.J. (bottom), Courtesy Saatchi Gallery. Neither are finalists.