Philadelphia Artist Wins the First Wolgin Art Prize

As we predicted last year when the prize was first announced, both the group of "nine prominent international art world figures" who nominated the initial set of artists for the prize and the set of jurors who awarded the prize took the predictable, easy way out and gave the prize to a very talented artist who is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an "emerging artist."

Trecartin is a true arts superstar and is known worldwide; his work has appeared at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, at London's Whitechapel alongside Shahryar Nashat, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He also recently scored a $60,000 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Thus he is not, under any reasonable definition, an "emerging artist." But this Tyler screw-up is not his fault and at least we kept the loot home.

Why the screw-up? Call it curatorial myopia, call it cultural elitism, or call it lack of cojones to enforce the Prize's goal, but we think that it is simply laziness, as (if done right) selecting a true emerging artist for this mammoth prize is a truckload of hard work.

An independent survey sponsored by The International Art Materials Trade Association (NAMTA) and American Artist magazine recently reported that there are 4.4 million active artists in the United States alone (600,000 professional artists, 600,000 college art students, and 3.2 million active recreational artists). That's a lot of artists, and 99.99% of them are emerging artists. That's just in the United States and this is supposed to be an international competition.

But with a lot of work it can be done, and in fact a model already exists in the National Gallery of Art's $25,000 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The key part in the model is the fact that artists can apply to the prize, rather than have a nomination process as the Wolgin Art Prize currently has.

The Wolgin Art Prize competition does not accept unsolicited applicants; it has been structured so that artists are nominated and these nominees were selected by "a group of nine prominent international art world figures from museums and educational organizations, representing the range of media eligible for consideration. The 14 nominees were then invited to submit an application, which was reviewed by the three-person jury."

Clearly this process didn't work and Tyler needs to restructure the process for the next Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts so the prize goes to someone who fits the focus intended by the very generous Mr. Wolgin.

We hope that he picks up the phone and tells Tyler to re-read the prize's intentions and we also hope that the next prize goes to a true emerging artist whose career will then be rocket-fueled by an award of this magnitude.