The SD
Art Prize is entering its 8th year and I thought it might be fun to
hear a history of why we have an art prize in San Diego. The story starts in 1973 in London.
I arrived
in England
at that time, worked as a receptionist and then ran an art gallery in the west
end. It was a time of miner’s strikes causing black outs and letter bombs from
the IRA. I zigzagged my way to work in the west end to avoid mail boxes with
suspicious letters hanging out of mail slots. We lit the gallery by candles
every other day during electric shortages.
Old
master still ruled at Sotheby’s and Christies and Bonhams was a tiny auction
house but the oldest started in 1793 and is now merged with Phillips and they
also bought the west coast Butterfields in 2002. Impressionist painting were on
the rise but very few contemporary artist came up in auctions.
This was
all to change when the first Tate Turner Prize was awarded in 1984 to Malcolm Morley, an English artist living in the United States. Receiving awards in the next four years were Howard
Hodgkin 1985, Gilbert & George 1986, Richard Deacon1987 Richard Long,
1989. All four were nominated in the first year. It was a private award, but
the shortlist was announced. It was controversial from the start.
The Tate
now called Tate Britain, in
1988 was the just the Tate
Museum. It housed all British made art only. The appointment of Tate Director, Nicholas
Serota led to many changes such as the introduction of an annual re-hang and
giving priority to modern and contemporary art. During this period the future of
the Prize was uncertain. The Turner Prize was modified to have no published
shortlist and a solo exhibition was awarded to the winner, Tony Cragg. But in 1990 there was no prize as there
was no sponsorship for it and it only sprang back to life in 1991. All four short-listed artists got a show and
the audience became more involved. The award ceremony started to be televised.
The Notional Lottery system was set up and the arts benefited. Only smokeless
coal could be used and the city started to clean all its buildings. The Tate
expanded to become Tate Modern and now has several other campuses in the UK. The Tate
Prize now rotates to other venues.
Some other artists who have received
the prize included Bill Woodrow., Anish
Kapooris, Lucian
Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Mach,
Paula Rego,
Sean
Scully, Rachel Whiteread, and Anthony
Gormley.
By 1995, the Turner Prize got more and more controversial and more
and more attention. Damien Hirst presented
his shark tank, Tracy Emin got drunk during the award ceremony, Chris Ofili's
used balls of elephant dung to prop up his works. Modern Art prices at the
auction house were on the rise. Charles Saachti had loaned work from his
collection for the Sensation show and started his own private museum.
When I
left England
in 1996, contemporary artists were getting prices for their work as high as
those of modern art. I discovered that San
Diego has wonderful artists but not too many people
knew about them. When I formed SDVAN in 2003, I decided that an Art Prize might
do something similar for the arts in SD as it had done in the UK. Making
artists into art stars and reminding people they could obtain art of excellence
in SD were some of the goals.
When Ann Berchtold joined the team in 2005, the
idea of an art fair was a tiny seed, but we started working toward the SD Art
Prize and in 2006, I got a grant from a foundation on the East Coast to fund
the first years of award money. In the
context of the Turner Prize we are babies. But now in our eighth year and with
the help of Erika Torri and Debra Poteet together with Ann Berchtold I have
hopes that Contemporary art and artists can affect the public in San Diego County,
someday, on the same scale as the Turner Prize helped catapult contemporary art
into the major leagues in the United
Kingdom.
