Awards

The country has gone awards crazy. Contest crazy.

Awards can be important to an artist early on because they give much needed strokes and validation.

However, once I reached the age where I was asked to judge awards, pick winners, I understood that the process had more to do with me than with artists or work. It was about my personal tastes.

The best awards, by far, are the ones you don't and can't apply for. These are few and far between. That's why my three-time "Roll of Honor" selection in Best American Short Stories was so important to me at the time and still feels good now: it just happened without my knowing about it. The vast of majority of awards I've received over the years I had to apply for or enter a competition for.

In other words, you have to market yourself. I always thought, still think, that if art really mattered, if it had an essential function in society, the work would matter more than the artist, artists would not be marketers and in fact might even be anonymous by cultural tradition (Glass thinks this should be so, I'm coming to agree), but this would require removing art as a commodity in a commercial market. Never happen in a capitalist society.

So what we need is a non-capitalist society. Ooooo, did I say that?