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Mayor's Arts Awards

March 25, 2009

Ain't those dancers cute?

The Mayor’s Arts Awards were held Monday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. It’s a pretty high-production values show, with awards to artists and arts organizations in 6 categories and to three categories of arts teachers, punctuated by performances of various kinds. I’m not going to review the show or critique the choices – I’m grateful that the Mayor and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities do this. But I’m just going to observe that we visual artists barely show up as a blip.
The dancers and theater folks are much cuter and God knows more dramatic and perky and pleasingly appealing, but they are also really well organized and get their communities behind their nominees. Now let’s face it – we are never going to be all that cute. Au contraire, we visual artists pride ourselves on being the anti-cute. We are the inverse, opposite, reverse cute, the counter-cute, the un-cute, the not-even-remotely adorable. The truth is that no-one will support us if we don’t support ourselves. So I think we should try and do better at putting together the documentation required to impress the jury for these awards and maybe do some lobbying for a new category or two that are more suited to the visual arts. Should a glass artist or a painter be competing aganst a dance company in the same category? Doesn't make sense to me.

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