Chris is an artist and curator. He used his own name to disagree with me about my column, and he makes some good points. Here is what he says, and my response is on the jump.

Jen,

It is natural and reasonable to question the process and the ultimate decision. However, I believe your rash judgments seem more like emotional outbursts than constructive criticisms, and I think it was in poor taste to belittle the winners and to insult the panelists since you can't possibly know what they learned during the extensive selection process.

I imagine we both would have come up with a very different list of finalists and winners than the one this panel selected... but we weren't on the panel.

We didn't see the complete list of nominated artists or know which of those nominated artists decided to submit the full application. We didn't get to review those applications or take part in the interviews & studio visits. We weren't part of the deliberation process that must have gone on between the 5 very qualified arts professionals that were on this diverse panel.

Who knows, if we went through this process maybe we would have ended up with a similar list of finalists and winners?

I am happy for these artists and thankful to Artist Trust and the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation for creating this award.

Posted by Chris Weber

Dear Chris,

If I am emotional, it is certainly not over the idea of these two perfectly nice, good artists getting money. I've written about them repeatedly, and never overly negatively.

These are very prominent artists in the city. Both have established careers and sell through leading galleries (Lawrimore Project and Greg Kucera). Both have won major awards and major commissions before, and continue to. A column explaining that I see them as good artists but that I wouldn't have chosen them for this award may not be fun for them to read—and it wasn't fun to write, since I am friendly with both of them (I saw one of them at an opening Sunday and ran the other way)—but it is not damaging to their life's work. And I imagine (with any luck) that it will not be permanently damaging to my relationships with each of them (although if it is, then so be it—being an artist is hard and criticism is not fun).

No, if I have any frustration, I guess it's probably with the simple fact that I want more innovation in general. (Don't worry, I want it from myself more than anyone else, and am constantly trying to figure that out, and often very aware that I am failing.) Plus, this is a brand new award, not an old crusty thing—so it is more critique-able (than, say, the long-established and seemingly impenetrable Betty Bowen Award). It seemed entirely possible that saying something now might matter in the future—but I also have to acknowledge that my way of saying things sometimes makes them hard to hear, and that seems to be the case here. (Nobody seems to notice the part where I say the gift is awesome!)

Another of my broader frustrations is that arts funding panels sometimes come up with weird choices, but nobody is supposed to mention it because there is some belief out in the world that whenever any artist gets money, an angel gets its wings. But the reality is that scarcity cuts both ways. It means that grants to artists are good, and that grants to artists have to be given very carefully. Scarcity makes people feel protective. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not; probably both are true.

And yet it's actually not about the money, when I think about it. Awards like this elect exemplars. Their symbolic import is their real contribution to art in the city. In this case, they come to symbolize innovation. I just had a phone conversation about this with Fidelma McGinn, Artist Trust Executive Director, who explained that the panel was specifically seeking artists who were making a change in their careers, the way Chihuly's game-changing moment in the 1970s altered the future of the medium of glass. That could point to future changes in these artists' works that we don't know about yet. She also pointed to a comment I hadn't noticed that she'd made on an earlier post, in which she says that the process may become more open next year (this year, 16 invited nominators forwarded the possibilities to the panel of judges). I think that'd be swell.

The conversation doesn't stop here. Artist Trust will be putting on a public conversation about innovation in the latter half of November. It's the central subject, isn't it? I guess I had better start really thinking about what I mean when I call for more of it.

Jen