Wow. That's Bad.

The top ten is out. The majority of the pieces are bad. Now what?

ArtPrize has a problem. If this is the kind of work that gets awarded colossal sums of money, then the best and brightest of the art world will not bother. The contest has the potential to be radically subversive. But with a top ten like this, it risks becoming the butt of a joke.

Artists and curators must summon a lot of energy, money, and time to bring art to ArtPrize. If two guys painted gold and perched in a beer garden win $250,000, why would anyone with taste bother? (By the way, there’s someone doing that right now in every major city in the Northern Hemisphere, and passing the hat. Here it merits patronage.)

This year the quality of curating has improved. Even tiny little galleries on the outskirts have pulled together art worth spending time with. Yet this year’s top ten is the worst. How did that happen?

Location has always skewed the voting in ArtPrize. Three of the top ten are at the BOB. Two are at the Public Museum. One at Gerald Ford. One at the GRAM. One on Fulton (which you do not have to get out of your car to see). One at DeVos Place. One at Monroe. All, except the mural on Fulton, are adjacent parking facilities. In one short week you can see what is convenient, not necessarily the best.

Maybe a simple idea is not enough.

Here are four ways we might save ArtPrize.

1. Make it a biennial. This would give the ArtPrize and arts institutions an opportunity to build educational programs and create a civic mission around what it means to be a city that honors and appreciates emerging artists. It also would give venues and artists a rest and build anticipation and encourage thoughtful preparation for the next competition.
2. Create two awards: a popular vote for art that you like and another vote for art that is good. This would help voters think through the difference between liking a work of art and discerning good from bad.
3. Give viewers five votes each to encourage a reasoned choices—weighing and balancing of strengths and weaknesses of favorite pieces.
4. Restructure the curating so venues have a reason to compete for high quality art. The BOB uses spectacle to drive people into its bar and pad its bottom line. Why not test the location hypothesis? If the BOB hired an excellent curator that brought together great works, what would happen then?

The quality of art is not in the eye of the beholder. Whether you like it is subjective. Whether it is good is another matter. We aren’t born with appreciation for good art, but everyone has the capacity to take it in and be moved by it. Everyone has the capacity to crave work that does more than the last one. We improve by talking about what we think is good, why we think it’s good. We improve by seeing more. As long as the most trafficked exhibit spaces display bad art, most voters won’t know what they are missing.