Jesse Darling wins the Turner Prize 2023 at Towner Eastbourne. Image courtesy PA.
As strange as it may seem — starting in 1912, the Olympics held juried art competitions as an official part of the games and conferred gold, silver, and bronze in medals in painting, sculpture, and printmaking. But — even as Duchamp and Picasso ushered in the exciting new era of Modernism — the judges only had eyes for regressive 19th-century styles. For better or worse, these categories were abandoned in 1948 and it’s now left to the art world to choose our own.
Picking the best contemporary artists is an inherently controversial proposition. Many of us prefer to talk in terms of personal taste. Nonetheless, when the world’s premier art institutions and foundations empanel the world’s top experts to decide on the best of the best, so many of us — artists, collectors, and art lovers alike — are spellbound in anticipation… Who will they pick? Because it matters!
Here, we look at a handful of prizes and awards that carry huge weight — including the Turner Prize, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award and the MacArthur Fellowship.
THE TURNER PRIZE
What It’s All About
Among the most talked about awards in the art world is the annual Turner Prize, which Tate Britain initiated in 1984 to create something for art akin to the Booker Prize for British Literature, promoting public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. It is named for the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775 – 1851), who the museum champions for never shying from controversy in pushing forward the boundaries of art.
What the Winner Gets
Currently, £25,000 (US$32,000) goes to the winner and £10,000 (US$12,800) to each of the artists shortlisted. Beyond the money is the tremendous exposure, prestige, and acclaim. It is an important cultural event in Britain and a huge media spectacle that the popular press loves to make sport of.
How It Works
The Turner Prize is awarded to one artist working in any media who was born or is based in the UK. Each year, Tate Britain empanels a new jury of independent art world professionals. Artists are nominated on the basis of an outstanding exhibition of their work in the preceding twelve months. The relevance of the work to the current art moment is more important than their lifetime achievement. Tate Britain announces the shortlist of four or five artists in the spring. In the fall, there’s an exhibition. Finalists are assessed on the merits of the exhibition for which they are nominated.
Turner Prize 2023
Jesse Darling won last year. The artist is celebrated for using commonplace materials to invoke societal breakdown and challenge perceived notions of labor, class, power, and Britishness.
Turner Prize 2024
On 24 April, Tate Britain announced the four artists shortlisted for this year’s 40th anniversary edition of the Prize:
- Pio Abad
Nominated for his exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which featured drawings, etchings, and sculptures highlighting the overlooked histories of artifacts in Oxford museums to reflect on cultural loss and colonial histories and his experience growing up in the Philippines.
- Claudette Johnson
Nominated for her exhibitions Presence at The Courtauld Gallery, London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York. Her intimate portraits of family and friends in pastel, gouache, and watercolor counter the marginalization of Black people in Western art history.
- Jasleen Kaur
Nominated for her solo exhibition Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow. The artist explores cultural inheritance, community struggle, and autobiography — combining sound and sculpture to bring everyday objects to life that reflect on her upbringing in Glasgow’s Sikh community.
- Delaine Le Bas
Nominated for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna. With painted fabrics, theatrical costumes, and sculptures, the artist created a bold and immersive performative environment drawing on the rich cultural history of the Roma people to address themes of death, loss, and renewal.
The work of these shortlisted artists will be exhibited at Tate Britain from 25 September 2024 to 16 February 2025. The winner will be announced with much fanfare at an award ceremony at Tate Britain on 3 December 2024.
Winners
In December the winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced. Past winners include Malcolm Morley (1984), Howard Hodgkin (1985), Anish Kapoor (1991), Rachel Whiteread (1993), Damien Hirst (1995), Douglas Gordon (1996), Simon Starling (2005), Tomma Abts (2006), Laure Prouvost (2013), Wolfgang Tillmans (2000), Chris Ofili (1998), Richard Long (1984).
THE MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP
The World’s Biggest Cash Prize
MacArthur Fellowships annually awarded to U.S. citizens or residents are familiarly known as MacArthur “Genius Grants.” They are less about acclaim than the concrete benefit of a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000. Little media fanfare surrounds the announcement of the fellows in late September or early October. The entire process is entirely under wraps. Applications are not accepted. The nominations and the jury of about twelve judges are anonymous and confidential. The first time that winners learn they were even up for consideration is when they receive their congratulatory phone call.
History
Among the 20 to 30 “exceptional, creative, and inspiring” people tapped each year to receive this legendary prize, there are typically only a handful of visual artists. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which awards the grant, claims it is less about what they have achieved in their career so far than what they are capable of. Since the foundation launched the award in 1981, 336 artists have been selected.
Winners
The 2024 fellows are not yet announced. Past laureates include Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman, Kara Walker, Trevor Paglen, and Julie Mehretu. Last year the following visual artists won the award:
- María Magdalena Campos-Pons
This Nashville-based Afro-Cuban artist is regarded as a key figure among Cuban artists who found their voice in a post-revolutionary Cuba. Her multi-media works, photographs, and sculptures address Cuban culture, gender, and sexuality — as well as her own multicultural identity (she is a mixture of Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian) and religion, with a particular focus on Catholicism and Santeria.
- Raven Chacon
This Native-American composer and artist merges music, visual art, and performance. His practice is inherently collaborative, relying on human and non-human performers, sampled sounds, and natural elements to redefine humans’ relationship to the land. Drawing on a Diné (Navajo) worldview, he redefines “the spaces in which we gather, the history of access of these spaces, and the land upon which these buildings sit.”
- Carolyn Lazard
Philadelphia-based artist Carolyn Lazard’s installations, sculptures, drawings, and other works build on her experience of living with chronic illness to explore concepts of the intimacy and labor involved in living with a chronic disability. She is a 2019 Pew Foundation Fellow, was one of the first of the Ford Foundation’s Disability Futures Fellows (2020), and in 2019 presented in installation in the Whitney Biennial.
- Dyani White Hawk
Based in Minneapolis, White Hawk is a Native American artist and independent curator (Sičangu Lakota)) who explores the enduring influence of Indigenous aesthetics on Modern and contemporary art. The artist often employs meticulous traditional bead- and quill-work as well as Lakota symbols that mirror geometric abstract painting motifs. The artist was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and, in April, was announced as a Guggenheim Fellow, Class of 2024.
GOLDEN AND SILVER LIONS (AT THE VENICE BIENNALE)
History
Among the most prestigious awards for artists in the world is the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion Award. The Venice Biennale was started in 1895, one year before the first modern Olympics. The Gran Premi (Grand Prize) was awarded until 1968, when it was discontinued. The prize was reintroduced as the Golden Lion award at the 1986 Biennale, featuring a trophy depicting the winged Lion of St. Mark, which is the Biennale’s logo. There is no monetary prize. Winners receive the iconic trophy, in addition to tremendous international acclaim.
Who Wins?
The pool is limited to those participating in the Biennale exhibition, but that includes a large number of international stars — this year the number was officially 331, with 88 national pavilions. No explicit criteria have been established for this award. What precisely “best” means is all up to the jury for the given, which is approved by the Biennale’s Board of Directors on the recommendation of its curator.
Golden and Silver Lions 2024
The 60th Venice Biennale presented the following awards on 20 April, 2024:
- Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition — awarded to Mataaho Collective founded in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2012. The Collective is four Māori women — Bridget Reweti, Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, and Terri Te Tau. Visitors to the Biennale’s main group exhibition Foreigners Everywhere encounter their enormous installation Takapau as the gateway to the rest of show. Creating a womb-like space comprised of woven and latticed polyester hi-vis tie-downs, it is “a cosmology and a shelter” that references Māori matrilineal textile traditions.
- Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition — awarded to London-born Karimah Ashadu who lives in Hamburg and Lagos. With great sensitivity and intimacy and a strong feminist persepctive, Ashadu’s video Machine Boys, presented alongside her brass sculpture Wreath, brings into focus the vulnerability, economic hardship, and subcultural experience of young men in Lagos, recently immigrated from the agrarian north, who are forced to perform their masculinity driving illegal motorbike taxis.
- Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — the two recipients were the Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the Paris-based Turkish artist Nil Yalter.
Anna Maria Maiolino is among the most significant artists working in Brazil today. Early on in the 1960s, she was identified with the important Brazilian movements of New Figuration and New Objectivity. Since the early 1980s, her abstractions arising from her experiments with process record unconscious gestures, daily rituals, and repeated actions in malleable materials.
In the 1960s, Turkish artist Nil Yalter explored social themes related to women's experiences and immigration, focusing on reversing the male gaze by objectifying her own body through the camera. Later work encompasses video art, digital media, and performance. In the last two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in her as a pioneer of feminist art.
- Golden Lion for Best National Participation — Australia won the award for the exhibition Kith and Kin, developed by artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose. Special mention in this category went to the Republic of Kosovo for Doruntina Kastrati’s exhibition The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, curated by Erëmirë Krasniqi.
kith and kin is Archie Moore’s sprawling presentation of a research-based project — a monumental Australian First Nations family tree spanning 65,000 years of history (“both recorded and lost”), which he spent four months hand-drawing in chalk on an expansive blackboard. An artist of Kamilaroi/Bigambul Aboriginal Australian and British descent, he focuses on intercultural understanding and misunderstanding and the wider concerns of racism.
Doruntina Kastrati’s installation The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin foregrounds the first-hand narratives of Kosovo’s working-class women having to work long hours for low wages in Turkish delight factories — against the backdrop of four large sculptures representing the shells of the different nuts used as ingredients.
- Special Mention at the Venice Biennale went to Israeli artist Samia Halaby who lives in New York and the Argentinian artist La Chola Poblete.
In the Nucleo Storico part of the Biennale exhibition, the Palestinian-American visual artist and activist Samia Halaby — now 87 years of age —presented an abstract cruciform painting of 1969, entitled Black is Beautiful, which she dedicated to the African-American scholar Elombe Brath and the black liberation movement of the same name.
La Chola Poblete’s large-scale watercolors are amalgams of sophisticated queer imagery featuring hybrid beings, abstractions, and religious and pop motifs that mirror the fluidity of her own identity. Among her subjects are the social marginalization of the Bolivian community in Argentina and evangelism as emotional and physical torture.
MARCEL DUCHAMP PRIZE
History
The most prestigious in contemporary art in France, this prize has been awarded since 2000 by the Association for the International Dissemination of French Art (ADIF) — an association of French art collectors — in partnership with the Centre Georges Pompidou. It is for a French artist or any artist who lives and works in France. The goal is three-fold: to support artists' international careers, encourage new artistic forms, and to highlight French creativity.
What the Winner Gets
The winner gets a show at the Pompidou and €35,000 (US$39,000). In addition, they receive an additional amount up to €30,000 (US$33,000) to cover their exhibition costs and a residency at Villa Albertine, a French organization in New York.
How the Winner Is Chosen
To select the winner, all members of the ADIF are eligible to vote. In 2020, this included 400 French art collectors, in addition to a small number of art professionals. This year, over 60 studio visits were arranged, until it was whittled down to just four finalists.
2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize
Last year, the ADIF awarded the Prize to Palestinian/Swedish artist Tarik Kiswanson, whose work explores how people navigate identities across many mediums.
2024 Marcel Duchamp Prize Finalists
- Abdelkader Benchamma
Benchamma is inspired by theories of astrophysics and cosmology — as well as existentialist theater — to create delicate drawings of states of matter, events, and explosions.
- Gaëlle Choisne
Choisne creates installations that blend esoteric Creole traditions, myths, and popular culture to address catastrophe, resource exploitation and colonialism.
- Noémie Goudal
Working in photography, film, and installation, Goudal creates monumental staged illusions of images placed into the landscape and rephotographed.
- The duo Detanico & Lain
The artists — who have collaborated since 1996 — create complex installations that break down motifs, images, sounds, words and the coding and decoding of different languages, giving rise to multiple interpretations of the same realities.
Winners
This year’s winner has yet to be announced. Recent past winners of the Marcel Duchamp Prize include Tarik Kiswanson (2023), Mimosa Echard (2022), Lili Reynaud-Dewar (2021), Kapwani Kiwanga (2020), and Éric Baudelaire (2019).
THE BUCKSBAUM AWARD
Overview
For each Whitney Biennial since 2000, the Whitney Museum selects one participant to win the Bucksbaum Award — which is named after the late collector and longtime trustee Melva Bucksbaum. Jurors looks at the work of the artists shown in the Whitney Biennial in addition to their past work to identify the one having the most “potential to make a lasting impact on the history of American art.” The prize is a solo show at the museum, plus $100,000.
Eligibility for the Whitney Biennial
Although the Whitney focuses on American art, the museum since 2014 has broadened its definition of what that means. There are no rules regarding citizenship and artists in recent Biennials have included those who have been based in the U.S. only at some point in their careers and are now based elsewhere. All participants in the Biennial are eligible to win the Bucksbaum Award.
Winners
The 2024 Bucksbaum Award winner has not yet been announced. Past winners include Ralph Lemon (2022), Tiona Nekkia McClodden (2019), Pope.L. Born (2017), Zoe leonard (1955), Zoe Leonard (2014), Sarah Michelson (2012), Michael Asher (2010), Omer Fast (2008) and Mark Bradford (2006).
THE KYOTO PRIZE
Japan’s “Nobel Prize”
The prestigious Kyoto Prize was created in 1985 by the Inamori Foundation in Kyoto, Japan in collaboration with the Nobel Foundation — and is regarded by many as the “Nobel Prize of Japan.” It is for supreme achievement in fields not covered by the Nobel. Winners are typically well known names, regarded as the living legends of our time.
Lifetime Achievement
Each June, the Foundation announces one laureate for lifetime achievement in the categories of Advanced Technology, Basic Science, and Arts and Philosophy. Winners receive gold medals and a prize of 100 million yen (US$700,000).
Arts and Philosophy
The category of Arts and Philosophy covers all the arts, including music, dance, architecture, fashion design, and visual art. This year it went to the choreographer William Forsythe. Visual artists who have won the Kyoto Prize include Nalini Malani (2023), Joan Jonas (2018), William Kentridge (2010), Roy Lichtenstein (1995), Nam June Paik (1998), and Isamu Noguchi (1985).
THE FUTURE GENERATION ART PRIZE
An International Prize for Young Unknown Artists Based in Ukraine
The Future Generation Art Prize was established in 2009 by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine as a biannual global contemporary art prize for artists under 35 years of age. It is a fantastic launching pad that gives exposure to emerging creatives from many regions often ignored by the global art world.
The Future Generation Art Prize 2023/2024
Yes, despite the war, the prize continues this year for its 7th edition and received over 12,000 entries across almost 200 countries. This year’s list of finalists includes 21 artists and artist collectives, spanning five continents. The exhibition of their work opens this August at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, Ukraine and runs through January 2025.
What the Winners Get
One main winner receives US$100,000, which includes a US$60,000 cash prize and a $40,000 investment in their practice. Up to five others at the jury’s discretion may receive US$20,000 each to fund an artist residence. Around 20 finalists are selected to produce a new commissioned work to be displayed at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv — an important contemporary art center founded by Pinchuk in 2006. In some years, this exhibition later travels to Venice as an official collateral event of the Biennale.
Supported by Huge Players in the Global Art World
The prize brings together some of the biggest names in the global art world including board members Richard Armstrong, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Dakis Joannou, Sir Elton John, Jeff Koons, Glenn D. Lowry, Takashi Murakami, Alfred Pacquement, and Miuccia Prada — in addition to esteemed art world professionals from far-flung art world capitals around the globe who volunteer to serve on the selections committee. The juries are also prominent. The first featured Daniel Birnbaum, Robert Storr, Okwui Enwezor, and Ai Weiwei.
Winners
The 2023/2024 winner of The Future Generation Art Prize will be announced at the award ceremony in October. Previous winners include Aziz Hazara (2021), Emilija Škarnulytė (2019), Dineo Seshee Bopape (2017), Nástio Mosquito and Carlos Motta (2014), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2012), and Cinthia Marcelle (2010).