ArtPrize isn’t your typical art competition. As enormous as it is radically open and wildly experimental, the annual fall event attracts more than 400,000 people to Grand Rapids, Michigan to vote on contemporary art. It’s messy, it’s dirty, it’s nearly half a million people talking about art.
ArtPrize announced today the hiring of a new executive director, Christian Gaines. We spoke to Gaines, whose background is in film festival management, to discuss his plans for the organization, host to one of the largest contemporary art prizes in the world.
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Over 47,000 voters and a handful of art critics cast their ballots for ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the winners of this year’s competition have been announced.
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Most of the year, the art world’s attention is focused on the big, international cities: New York, London, Miami Beach, LA, Basel, etc. But starting in the fall of 2009, ArtPrize put the far lesser-known city of Grand Rapids, Michigan on the art world map. ArtPrize quickly became famous in part for its openness — anyone over 18 may enter their artwork; in part for its voting style — often described as American Idol–like, with anyone allowed to register and vote; and in part for the large sums of money it gives away — $200,000 for the winner of the public vote, another $160,000 for the others in the public top 10, plus a new $100,000 Grand Juried prize this year and five more $20,000 juried awards in specific categories. That’s a whole lot of prize money.
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Artist registration is open now for the fourth annual ArtPrize. Part art competition, part social experiment, the event overtakes downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, bringing in hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the country.
Designed to be a simple yet transformative experience for both artist and audience, ArtPrize is a platform on which artists are given absolute freedom to experiment, collaborate and explore new ideas. Artist registration is open at www.artprize.org now through May 24.
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Today, ArtPrize, which bills itself as the most “radically open, international art competition and social experiment,” announced it will be rejiggering its financial offerings to competitors with a more robust juried prize and less (but still) spectacular populist award.
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After revealing the Top 6 trends of ArtPrize from my position as a participating ArtPrize artist, I wanted to compose a second blog post for Hyperallergic that revealed the Top 10 Things I genuinely found interesting during this art event experience.
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GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN — As an artist participating in ArtPrize myself, I had the amazing experience of not only visiting Grand Rapids for the first time, but also experiencing this mega-event for the first time. While walking around the city snapping pics, I was instantly reminded about my solo trip to the Venice Biennale in 2003 when I was just a college kid: feeling like an outsider to the local people, crossing bridge after bridge and trying to consume the overwhelming amount of artwork around me. As a cultural producer, I can’t help but analyze and tally the formal and conceptual trends that are present in such a saturated art environment.
So from the perspective of a dude like me, here are the Top 6 things I saw at ArtPrize 2011 …
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The idea of ArtPrize as an “open art contest” sounds fantastic, hell, even awesome, but if you thought all the art was going to be good than you were delusional. Enter ArtPrize Worst, the tumblelog. A selection of crappy art that thought it had a chance at the world’s biggest art purse.
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