James F. English
THE ECONOMY OF PRESTIGE
Prizes, awards and the circulation of cultural value
409pp. Harvard University Press. £18.95. (US $29.95).
0 674 01884 2
Among the many tasks the critic Edmund Wilson listed on the legendary postcard of services he would not perform was “judge literary contests”. Today, judging cultural competitions is a part of the job description for any respectable literary critic, professor or writer, not to mention comedian, actress and model. The New Year season, along with shopping and bingeing, is also the high season of judging, prize-giving, best-of-year listing and gift-recommending, as every critic and columnist hands out golden stars and lumps of coal. Indeed, according to James F. English, in his elegant and entertaining book, The Economy of Prestige, we are living in the Age of Awards. The proliferation of contests and prizes, he argues, is “perhaps the most ubiquitous feature of cultural life, touching every corner of the cultural universe from classical music to tattoo art, hair styling, and food photography”. The International Congress of Distinguished Awards lists 26,000 contests in arts and science, with more than a hundred prizes worth over $100,000. There are now at least 1,000 film festivals, giving out 9,000 annual awards (twice as many as the number of films made every year), plus 1,500 substantial literary prizes in the United States and the United Kingdom alone. Memorial prizes have become routine, and almost expected when an academic or an artist dies. But even when the cultural field is littered with prizes in all stages of their life cycle, from newborn to discontinued, it does not become saturated. Each new award only defines the need for more precisely limited sub-prizes, and with globalization, the awards industry has been expanded by increasing demands for cultural recognition from emerging ethnic or minority groups.
But English, a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is not daunted by the magnitude of the problem. Travelling to Rome and London and spending six months undertaking intensive research in Los Angeles, he set out to investigate the history and mechanics of the global awards industry and its role in the status games of contemporary culture. How, he asks, isprestige produced by competitions? What rules govern its circulation? How has globalization changed the economy of cultural capital? In answering these questions, he was guided primarily by the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who broadened the concept of capital to include “anything that registers as an asset, and can be put profitably to work, in one or another domain of human endeavour”.
Such capital can be social, political, journalistic or cultural, and it is traded on a global market that needs measurements more complex and sophisticated than hard currency in order to compare degrees of power and prestige. Moreover, everything surrounding the competitive game of culture is part of its value. Although the superior tone of satire, mockery, scorn and condescension that often accompanies public discussion of prizes might make it appear that true artists and intellectuals, as well as journalists, disdain them as irrelevant or antithetical to high cultural achievement, English maintains that such attacks are actually “an integral part of the prize frenzy itself”, part and parcel of its publicity machinery and visibility. Scandals too are part of the game. Whether in terms of corruption, internal squabbles, conflict of interest, grudges, public displays of poor cultural sportsmanship, or conspicuously tossing the awards plaque in the nearest bin before you even leave the building, scandalous performances by the winners, the losers and judges contribute to the hype and excitement of an event.
Prizes, English suggests, are vital to contemporary cultural production because they are “our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion”. But if prizes act as cross-cultural instruments of conversion, what exactly is their exchange rate? English doesn’t attempt to offer a guide to how many lesser literary awards add up to one Booker, or how many golden panthers count against an Oscar, a BAFTA, or a win at Cannes. But he does ascertain a hierarchy of expenses for the various kinds of cultural awards. Book prizes are the least costly to administer, because literary judges are the least well paid and work from home. True, the related expenses for meetings, publicity and celebration make the Orange Prize cost many times more to administer than the actual award – the reason big literary awards need corporate sponsorship – but the Orange Prize is a bargain compared to the Pritzker Prize in architecture, which flies judges around the world to look at buildings in situ. Film festivals require the financial support of a city which uses them to establish itself as a holiday destination and a cultural centre. Film festivals also generate spin-offs, salons des refusés like Slamdance at the Sundance Festival in Utah, and these satellite festivals add to the prestige and cultural capital of the main event.
English positions himself as an objective analyst, whose aim is not to criticize the awards industry but to see it as part of contemporary cultural practice. He is a witty, shrewd and urbane observer, but he also withdraws into academic understatement when the material gets particularly outrageous or controversial. He even relegates the listings of major prize collectors to the neutrality of the appendix, where we learn that Michael Jackson holds the record for pop music awards (240), Steven Spielberg for film (ninety), Frank Gehry for architecture (130), John Ashbery for poetry (forty-five) and John Updike for fiction (thirty-seven). (Toni Morrison, whom he describes as a “most active and enthusiastic collector of literary awards”, has racked up a mere twenty-three.) Even when he notes the “cloying language of gifts and gratitude” characteristic of presentation ceremonies, some of it so grovelling and hyperbolic as to embarrass a courtier of Louis XIV, English sees prize seekers and givers as cultural strategists who understand the economy of prestige.
He gets most indignant, although not very, discussing the “lopsided and disequilibrious” situation of judges in cultural competitions. The endowments and financial arrangements for most cultural prizes are meagre “for those who are expected to do the work”. Indeed, the popularity of memorial prizes is partly owing to their relative cheapness compared to the cost of erecting a building, or the ongoing support of a symphony or museum. In the anticipatory pleasures of seeing their generosity annually acknowledged, and hobnobbing with famous artists, philanthropists usually underestimate the actual costs of running a competition, from the selection and recruitment of judges, to the final ceremony. “As a result”, he says, “we find the awards industry staffed to an extraordinary degree with voluntary or very low-paid workers”, who include both named judges and the anonymous previewers, sorters and selectors who do advance screening.
This exploitation of the nameless in order to enrich the celebrated is common in the small world of academia, which English himself inhabits. In its proliferation of prizes, memorial, organizational and institutional, academia can rival even the film festivals. Anyone who has served on a committee to choose honorary degree recipients knows of the jockeying to come up with a demographically balanced slate of the honourable, the wealthy, the famous and the local without falling back on one or more of the usual suspects who collect such tokens annually. The most egregiously unbalanced American academic prizes are the MacArthurs, or “genius awards”, in which faculty members are asked to write unpaid lengthy recommendations for their colleagues and rivals, while the winners receive huge sums in order to pursue their intellectual interests untrammelled by financial need.
Why do people agree to perform these time-consuming and selfless services? English suggests that they are seduced by the allure of managing taste, even at a distant and anonymous remove. Some love art or scholarship;
others feel some obligation to the profession; most desire the “social and symbolic awards that accrue to judges”. They enjoy feeling like gatekeepers, king-makers or power brokers. Some exploit this power; others hold it in secret. Dealing with the MacArthur and other rich foundations, they may delude themselves that they will improve their own chances of winning if they are co-operative and helpful.
Of course, such motives and ambitions have to be well concealed. When Toni Morrison’s academic admirers, friends and supporters violated the rules of the awards game by openly campaigning in a letter to the New York
Times Book Review for her to win the top American book awards, they caused a furore among traditionalists and right-wingers. But, English suggests, in calling these awards “keystones of the canon of American literature”, and demanding that they be given to an outstanding African-American novelist, they openly acknowledged the economic and political leverage of prizes, refused to go along with the pretence that literary value is intrinsic, not manufactured, and exposed the sanctimonious myth that the true artist stands alone and outside the vulgarities of competition. In English’s view, such overt demystification of cultural prestige may finally bring down the awards system. But I wouldn’t expect this collapse any time soon. Already, in New York Magazine’s best-of-the-year list, The Economy of Prestige has received its first award.
