Interesting to think that the ultimate value and worth of any process or product of ART can be decided through what appears to be a basic democratic process: the vote.

While I am a great believer in the necessity for ART to speak to and about and through the experiences of a majority and its inherent and irreplaceable internal minorities, I am more guarded about that majority’s ability to see itself and its experiences clearly enough to decide what is its great ART. This is not really the fault of the majority, just a phenomenon of human nature: often the ART (and truly, the science) that most successfully reflects and elevates and interprets these shared visions, experiences and collective aspirations is collected and focused through the lenses of the eyes of artists who live, work and produce somewhat outside of what is recognized as the popular culture’s “majority” view of which ARTistic expression has the most value.

Short of deifying the cliché of the lonely, often poor, “artist-in-the-garret” motif beyond its usefulness or ability to produce great ART and not just very original alcoholic slobbering, it is still a fact that much of the most outstanding human creative vision is generated by those who actually find themselves out-of-step with the majority of the people, views and perspectives of the times in which they live, regardless of how accurately and empathically they are eventually found to have reproduced or evolved the human aesthetic vision of their time so that it reaches and blends, even prophetically, into the future’s majority.

Even during The Renaissance and other historical eras in which the only ART that was lauded and allowed to exist or was paid for was religious in nature, the artists themselves were often chronically out of step with the values and mores of their sponsors. One interesting story that relates to this would be how, in the ecstatic religious poses of much of Renaissance painting and sculpture, it was less than a secret that these expressions were duplications of post-coital bliss and/or sexual ecstasy. Do you think any ART that portrays even the merest suggestion or possibility of naked sexual bliss, no matter how brilliantly, would be funded by anything the Amway Twins and their offspring would sponsor?

Therein lies the problem… for even the Popes and Emperors of old were willing to consider that such things are not mutually exclusive… or at least by ignoring such connections, save face. So ART the likes of Piss Christ or Mapplethorpe become a modern anathema and cannot even be considered, when many a Renaissance portrayal of the passion of Christ could be considered to be, quite literally, that!

With that in mind it might behoove (beHOOVE… great word!) us all to think twice about how we choose what great art is, or who we allow to fund and influence our decisions about ART, and whether having an election is the wisest way to make decisions about what ART gets the most support: we could end up with galleries full of pictures of cats and waifs with big eyes, or public sculptures, architecture and city design that is so careful not to offend anyone that it ultimately only succeeds in being boring, and fails to outdo the buildings and neighborhoods that stood before and were razed to make room for the new stuff.

Is that, perhaps, one of the reasons the most architecturally interesting building in downtown Grand Rapids is the new Hunting YMCA and nothing of bricks, mortar, steel and glass that bears the names of DeVos or that other soap guy and/or their spawn?

Created with funds from a business that has been sanctioned for price fixing and failing to police its income representations, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation funds ultra-conservative causes. It supports the privatization of the school system. It supports the Acton Institute, which opposed the Kyoto Protocol and works actively against social justice activists. It has given money to Focus on the Family and the National Day of Prayer Task Force, organizations managed by the Dobsons, who run repugnant anti-gay campaigns and “ex-gay” therapy groups.

This money trail is not neutral. It is completely attached to a very well-defined political and religious agenda. It does not seem to me that DeVos family is giving away a quarter-million dollars of this money out of the goodness of their hearts…to make their son happy…or because they’re art lovers.

Glen, I agree with your comments completely. “ArtPrize epitomizes this idea of Art as Real Estate. Art is transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold and voted upon.” That’s beautifully stated, and really hits at the core of the issue.

ArtPrize epitomizes this idea of Art as Real Estate. Art is transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold and voted upon.

That said, I think that we need to be a bit more careful of simply lumping Rick DeVos in with the rest of his family (to his credit, there was an article in the Press a while back in which he said that his elders’ politics make it hard for him in the art world). To be sure, he got his money from the DeVos fortune–and the money for the prizes is coming from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation–but it isn’t necessarily that simple. Each of generation of the DeVos family does things a little bit different and I think there is so much “anti-Devos” talk–some of it for good reason–that things get pretty muddled. A good critique is great (and there is plenty of fodder–the DeVoses are pretty despicable), conspiracy theories and simple generalizations are not. I’m not necessarily saying that Jeff’s two pieces make generalizations, but a lot of the opposition to ArtPrize that I have been hearing is based on broad–and often flawed–ideas about the DeVos family.

A place like DeVos Hall is a continuous, never-needing-to-be-renewed advertisement of the family’s name and power, and their willingness to be beneficent–when it suits them. ArtPrize blurs the line between art and this kind of propaganda even further.

It was a stroke of genius to advertise that “the people” get to vote to award the prize, but let’s remember those votes are collected and assessed by a group that has a specific agenda and very pointed political plans, plus a knowledge of how to use the buzz around ArtPrize to advance them.

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” JFK said that. Let’s ask ourselves, as you have in this commentary, what’s the real truth of this event, and how can we keep focused on the bigger picture?

PS Every time I type the name “DeVos,” my spellcheck tries to change it to “Devious.” A coincidence? I think not.