Lucky Strikeout
There's been some ambivalence about the new forms that art funding has taken--as there should be, since it is always well to question the sources of money, if only to know who we're beholden to. I mean, government funding is nice and all, but you should never forget it's the government--not that government money is the only deal with the devil that artists make in order to get paid; let us take a moment to remember Pigs on Parade.
Something tells me we'll never see the government as generous as it was in the '60s and '70s: Back then a brand-new National Endowment for the Arts used peer-panel review to award unrestricted grants to artists. But the individual grants are gone--a casualty of the culture wars of the '80s, '90s, and beyond--and NEA Chairman Dana Goia's Big Idea is that sending Shakespeare 'round the country is better suited to our idea of ourselves as cultural beings than encouraging new work by talented Americans who haven't been dead for centuries.
So when Lucky Strike stepped into the gap to address the lack of support for art, I was ready to listen. And they got off to a great start, what with giving The Stranger money for five Genius Awards (unrestricted grants of $5,000, and then giving us extra money when one of our awards resulted in a tie), funding an artist residency in one of the studios above VAIN, pouring money into Consolidated Works--and, moreover, not insisting on a particularly high-profile presence in any of these undertakings, more like a benevolent and generous godparent than an insistent, guilt-wielding stepmother.
In the last month or so, however, a new development in Lucky Strike's strategy has emerged, and it's one that I'm not crazy about. Somewhere in this paper, you'll find a full-page advertisement for the Lucky Strike Art Pack Competition, which asks artists to design an original work of art--in any medium--that can fit inside a cigarette box; 20 winners will receive $2,000, for a total of $40,000 in prizes. The artist uses the $2,000 to create 200 copies of the winning work, which will be given away with the purchase of a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
This is Pigs on Parade all over again: a grant that leaves the artist with only as much money as what's left over after production, and a product that's not necessarily in line with the artist's work. To be sure, Art Pack has laid out strict rules that no cigarette brand be used in the work (along with a prohibition on cartoons that signals they're only interested in high art), but it's still the same model. Pigs on Parade was a community benefit disguised as arts funding; the Art Pack Competition uses artists as advertising devices.
God knows I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I think this Art Pack is a serious misstep, and Lucky Strike should abandon it. It undermines your other funding gestures, Lucky Strike, the ones that have the good sense and trust to let artists do what artists do. Believe me, there's a difference. You don't have to turn art into a promotional deal to get people to notice.
