At 5 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, before a private assemblage of
formally dressed guests, a sculptor, a painter, a composer and
an architect will be ushered into the presence of Prince Hitachi
of Japan and his wife, Princess Hanako, who will present each
of them with a medal and a check for roughly $150,000.
The ceremony, held in the Meiji Memorial Hall in Tokyo and filled
with as much protocol as a royal wedding, will mark the fifth
time the Praemium Imperiale, or Imperial Prize, has been conferred
on a group of cultural luminaries by the imperial family of Japan.
In truth, the imperial family does not actually give the prize,
but only presents it on behalf of the Japan Art Association. And
the Japan Art Association is not the real maker of the prize;
it is acting on behalf of Fujisankei Communications, a vast Japanese
media conglomerate whose chief executive conceived the prize in
1988 and which has been paying the bill, estimated at roughly
$3 million a year, to keep it going since its first awards were
given in 1989.
The elaborate ritual surrounding the Praemium Imperiale, which
this year will go to Richard Serra, Zao Wou-ki, Henri Dutilleux,
Charles Correa and Sir John Gielgud (whose health will prevent
him from attending the ceremony), underscores the extent to which
prizes in the arts have become a matter of corporate prestige
and international diplomacy, not to mention big dollars. Gone
are the days when arts awards consisted only of bronze medals
or pretty plaques presented in hotel ballrooms; leading lights
in the performing and visual arts now compete for numerous prizes
in the six-figure range.
Like the Nobel Prizes, which were the models for the new generation
of arts prizes (and which, following Alfred Nobel's preferences,
ignored all the arts except literature), the new prizes are generally
underwritten by wealthy individuals or corporations seeking to
gain high profiles as patrons of the arts. It's a lot easier to
earn immortality in the arts by giving a prize with your name
on it than by slipping into the welter of donors to a museum or
dance company, at least so long as you manage to achieve the publicity
that the new generation of arts prizes depends on to survive.
That's often as much a matter of who the recipient is as what
the prize is. When the Praemium Imperiale was established, it
went to Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, I. M. Pei and Pierre
Boulez, all names big enough to help garner the prize some notice.
This year, the architect Frank Gehry, as rapidly rising a star
as exists anywhere in the cultural firmament, received the first
Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, a grant of approximately $250,000
to be awarded each year "to a man or woman who has made an
outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world," in
the words of Gish's will, which directed that the prize be established
after her death last year.
The first Gish Prize ceremony, which took place on Oct. 12 at
the Lotos Club in New York, did not possess quite the treaty-signing
formality of a Praemium Imperiale presentation, but the Lotos
Club's small, ornate ballroom was nonetheless crowded full with
well-known figures in the arts, including Arthur Penn and Carol
Burnett, both of whom served on the Gish jury, and Jane Alexander,
the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who conferred
her blessing on the Gish Prize by delivering a short address.
The sheer size of the prize gave it an instant high profile, raising
it above the thousands of arts prizes that are given every year
carrying no cash or only small amounts of it. It did not quite
earn the status of front-page news that is traditionally given
to the Nobel, however. Unlike other kinds of news, prizes are
often bigger news when they are old, since their stature seems
to rise over time, as has happened with the Nobel and the Pulitzer
Prizes. (The Nobel grew famous in part because of the vastness
of Alfred Nobel's estate, which now yields roughly $1 million
per honoree, while the Pulitzer's reputation came in spite of
its largess, since its recipients get only $3,000.)
Even prizes as hefty as the Wexner Prize of $50,000, given since
1992 by Leslie Wexner, the chairman of the retail company the
Limited, for an artist whose work "has consistently challenged
convention," and the Wolf Foundation Prizes, established
in 1976 by the Israeli chemist Dr. Ricardo Wolf, by which $100,000
a year is divided among several recipients in science and the
arts, have yet to become firmly enough established to be as noticed
by the general public as older awards.
The first donor to realize the potential impact of a huge sum
of cash was Jay Pritzker, the Chicago financier and chairman of
the Hyatt Corporation, who in 1979 established the Pritzker Prize
in architecture, at the urging of Carleton Smith, a consultant
who had established prizes in several areas. The Pritzker Prize,
which confers $100,000, rapidly became the most prestigious an
architect could aspire to, and it may be the most successful example
anywhere of the skillful use of a big-money arts prize for public-relations
benefit. The Pritzker name, once known for the ubiquitous Hyatt
hotels the family has built, is now as closely associated with
distinguished architecture as the Pulitzer name is associated
with distinguished journalism.
The award has been well managed from the start: the size of the
Pritzker cash grant, exceptionally large for the 1970's, drew
attention to the prize at the outset. The Pritzker also had a
jury full of cultural eminences. And since the first Pritzker
honoree, Philip Johnson, had a high public profile, his name added
further luster to the new prize.
Since then, the Pritzker has gone to a range of architects, from
the widely celebrated like Mr. Pei and Kevin Roche, to some who
are younger and lesser known, like Christian Portzamparc, this
year's recipient.
While the Pritzker family appears to enjoy the prestige that has
come to it from 15 years of Pritzker Prizes, the officials who
manage the prize say that the family takes no role in the judging.
Neither Jay nor Cindy Pritzker serves on the jury, which is headed
by J. Carter Brown, the former director of the National Gallery
of Art, and includes such well-known figures as Giovanni Agnelli,
the chairman of Fiat; Jacob Rothschild, the chairman of the National
Gallery of Art in London, and Ada Louise Huxtable, a former architecture
critic of The New York Times.
"I go to the Pritzkers afterward," said Bill Lacy, the
selection committee's secretary, "and tell them who won."
There is not quite this kind of distance between those who underwrite
the Praemium Imperiale and those who are charged with choosing
its winners. By its very nature -- five prizes each year in various
areas of the arts -- it engenders a more complex process, and
hence a larger, more bureaucratic organization, than the Pritzker
Prize.
Several international advisers, including Helmut . Schmidt, the
former West German Chancellor, Edward Heath, the former British
Prime Minister, and, in the United States, David Rockefeller Jr.,
convene committees in their home countries to recommend honorees
to the Japan Art Association, which reviews them further.
But final decisions are made not by these eminent advisers but
by a 17-member committee in Japan working under the aegis of the
art association. The committee works anonymously, not unlike the
inspectors who confer Michelin stars on restaurants in France,
but it reports to the executive committee of the art association.
While the Fujisankei name appears nowhere on any of the literature
about the prize, one of the corporation's highest-ranking executives,
Shigeaki Hazama, the head of the company's newspapers, is chairman
of the Praemium Imperiale executive committee, while another,
Hishahi Hieda, the head of Fujisankei's television group, is chairman
of the Praemium Imperiale finance committee.
The connection between the company and the prize is played down
mainly for reasons of protocol: it was important to Fujisankei
that the prize appear not to be too commercial, and have the status
of an official award presented by the imperial family. But the
company provides virtually all of the money to support the prize;
its executives are closely involved in the process of managing
the prize, and its public-relations consultants in the United
States handle publicity for it. Fujisankei annually funnels money
into the Japan Art Association to pay for the prize, although
a $20 million endowment fund is now quietly being sought, which
would broaden the base of support.
Fujisankei spokesmen will not reveal the actual cost of the prize
each year. The rule of thumb, however, is that the total annual
costs of managing a large international arts prize average roughly
four times the award amount.
Is this the best use of money for the arts? Advocates of the big-money
prizes argue that the publicity the prizes bring focuses attention
on the arts in general, and thus helps all artists, not just the
winners. And the economics of a career in the arts are such that
few winners, however famous and celebrated they may be, earn enough
money not to care about it. After he won the Gish Prize, Mr. Gehry,
who has already won the Pritzker, the Wolf and the Praemium Imperiale,
was asked what he intended to do with this windfall.
"I'm going to try and pay down some of my mortgage,"
he said.