Just as I’m turning in my “Best Of” jazz 2005 votes to various publications, I read this essay by A. O. Scott in the NY Times Book Review, about James F. English’s book The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard U. Press). I’m ever more conflicted about the critics’ polls and such, not entirely sure what they measure. If anything, the voting process encourages us to be rigorous about what we hear, live and on disc, and to assess what it all means as the years go by. In regard to the National Book Awards and other such honors, Scott writes:
[P]rizes flourish to the extent that they are not taken seriously, but this does not mean they are all a big joke. Rather, they exist in a limbo of anxiety and uncertainty about the status of artistic and intellectual endeavor in a global consumer economy. We assume — we know — that art and thought have value, but we lack agreed-upon means to measure that value, so we come up with tools that are transparently and grandly inadequate to the task. Prestige, that is, functions as a poor substitute for even less tangible attributes; it is not necessarily the same as excellence, but it is not necessarily not the same. It is not ratified by commercial success, except on those occasions when it is. And prizes sometimes do go to the best candidates, which are sometimes (and sometimes not) also the most popular.
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