Currency: the price of prestige

My clients uniformly agree that with most grants for arts and culture, the money is too little, the time is too short, and the administrative burden is too high. Nevertheless, we keep applying for grants. We continue to apply because we struggle to find material support. In my previous post Grids and Gravity, I argued that artists will vie for small-dollar grants not because they are sufficient, but because they are what is available.

Competition for these limited resources is high. I just got news from a client that our application for a creative project grant scored 97.08% on the rubric but was not funded. This was for a grant given on a monthly cycle, and our application was one of 115 eligible applications that were reviewed. 14 applications were awarded.

But scarcity of arts funding dollars alone does not explain the persistence of these systems. Grants confer something as consequential as money: prestige. Anthropology, evolutionary theory, and behavioral research all tell us that prestige is a major driver of attention. Prestige strongly shapes who people pay attention to, and artists need attention for their work. 

The need for attention is not narcissism. Attention is not optional in cultural processes. Artists have a strong relational drive. Most artists do not want only to make work in isolation. They want the work to meet others, to register, to circulate, to matter. It is not enough just to make the art: As philosophers from John Dewey to Jacques Rancière have stated in different ways, art is completed in the encounter with its perceiver(s). That relational drive is legitimate and deep. In this way, prestige becomes structurally relevant because it can lead to real contact with audiences. 

In a field where material support is thin and inconsistent, prestige functions as a crucial, dopamine-enhancing parallel currency. An artist who has been awarded has had their relational need met: their work has been noticed, considered, and discussed, at least among a group of grant panelists. My clients almost uniformly describe a grant award as a form of encouragement to keep going, to keep working against the many odds they face. The resulting boost to confidence and pride are valuable in and of themselves. 

It is generally known that prestige is produced, assigned, and distributed through grants and awards from institutions that have wealth and/or elevated public status. The awarding body is trusted to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. They tell the public that an artist’s endeavor has been positively differentiated from peers by a recognized body through some formal process of selection. 

Both within and beyond the arts and culture sphere, people tend to use prestige as a shortcut when direct assessment is slippery. This shortcut is especially tempting when evaluating art and artists. Art does not always ask to be converted into clear conceptual meaning. It may ask to be received through sensation, duration, association, disturbance, pleasure, or recognition. These things can be hard for panelists to align with decision-making rubrics. 

The temptation for the prestige shortcut is made stronger by grant applications that only supply panelists with “work samples”—a few minutes of audio, video, or viewing slides—in order to judge the artwork. Panelists do not experience the work firsthand through the selection process. So a list of previous awards on the applicants’ CV will signal distinction, mastery, and cultural salience that may be hard to read in the work itself. 

The machinations of prestige are apparent when my clients complain that funding goes to the same trending cohort of artists. It is common knowledge that receiving one grant can strengthen the case for receiving another. A grant or award can change how an artist is received even by people who know little about the work itself. An award becomes a public cue that this artist is worth noticing, programming, reviewing, introducing, funding again, or taking seriously. In other words, the recognition does not just reflect esteem; it promises more work and more opportunities.

Insufficient support structures with high prestige attached have the potential to train artists to metabolize underfunding through symbolic elevation. Echoing our larger culture, prestige can capture and subvert a real need for relation and connection. When prestige serves as a replacement for real support, it feeds the wish to be selected, elevated, adorned with institutional approval, and surrounded by an aura of specialness. The honest needs for subsistence support enabling deep practice and meaningful encounters with audiences are never really fulfilled, but somehow that is OK.

The prestige dynamic makes opting out of the grant game consequential in a number of ways. Opting out may feel like stepping away from relevance, momentum, or possible arrival. Prestige narrows what seems reasonable to reject and enlarges what artists are expected to absorb. Over time, this can make it harder to distinguish between an opportunity that genuinely supports the work and one that mainly draws on the artist’s hope, endurance, and willingness to carry the gap.

I had a demonstration of this when I shared a draft of Invisible Spill with an accomplished artist colleague. That post uses an example of a real opportunity and analyzes it to show how the grantmaker asks for civic impact at the level of a large urban center through a new work, while suggesting the artist pay themselves a paltry amount out of an already small budget allocated for the project. The colleague said, “Wow. When you lay it out like that it really shows how crazy it is. Because when I originally looked at this opportunity it seemed pretty good. And I realize how much I hide these calculations from myself just as a function of trying to survive in the field.”

Prestige allows weak support structures to persist without forcing a reckoning with what they fail to provide. An opportunity may carry status, but without sufficient funding, time, care, stability, and administrative relief, it does not truly, materially support artistic life and work. The question for the field is, will we reckon?

#pouringwaterintoboxes