ArtPrize and Innovation: does Art need either one?

Art­Prize is upon us here in River City. For lo these many months, a top­i­cal con­di­tion has devel­oped that I have come to call the ‘Dilemma of ArtPrize.’

It could be best described with these remarks:  ‘Why are they doing it and what is it really for?” or “Hey Art­Prize: I really like what you are doing but you should do it this way” and of course “Art­Prize is great, why do you want it to fail, you must hate our city.”

So why does Art­Prize exist?

Is it just a ‘rad­i­cally open art com­pe­ti­tion, giv­ing away the world’s largest art prize’? Is it only about view­ing and vot­ing for and against visual art in some neo-populist fash­ion? Is there more to it? A frag­ment, a clue, may lie here in this blog post on Rapid Growth Media where Rick DeVos remarks:

I thought that mod­els like X-Prize were par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing as a cat­a­lyst and orga­ni­za­tional model because they cre­ate a large incen­tive for attain­ing a par­tic­u­lar goal, which in turn entices a large group of indi­vid­u­als and teams to go after that goal.

Let’s look at a study by McK­in­sey and Com­pany pub­lished ear­lier this year on Using Prizes to Spur Inno­va­tion (free, but reg­is­tra­tion is required). The firm talks about the explo­sion of prizes being used to spark inno­va­tion, in par­tic­u­lar X-Prize. Check out this 14 minute pod­cast with Peter Dia­man­dis, the CEO of the X-Prize:

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Also this excerpt from the report sup­ports the premise that the ‘prize’ model is a grow­ing trend in phil­an­thropic activity:

More­over, the role of prizes is chang­ing: nearly 80 per­cent of those announced since 1991 have been designed to pro­vide incen­tives for spe­cific inno­va­tions rather than to reward excel­lence in gen­eral. An under­stand­ing of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of effec­tive prizes and of how they are evolv­ing would be use­ful for not only phil­an­thropists but also pub­lic– and private-sector play­ers hop­ing to har­ness their poten­tial for innovation.

When are prizes more effec­tive than other kinds of phil­an­thropic instru­ments? Our research sug­gests that three con­di­tions are para­mount: a clear objec­tive (for exam­ple, one that is mea­sur­able and achiev­able within a rea­son­able time frame), the avail­abil­ity of a rel­a­tively large pop­u­la­tion of poten­tial prob­lem solvers, and a will­ing­ness on the part of par­tic­i­pants to bear some of the costs and risks.

What is the auda­cious, out­ra­geous solu­tion of Art­Prize? Is the cur­rent way we are view­ing art a prob­lem that needs to be solved? Is the break­through of Art­Prize a triad of  a com­pe­ti­tion, a com­mer­cial enter­prise and a cul­tural cat­a­lyst for Grand Rapids?

Some­where in the next two weeks we may start see where the truth lies.