By JRS
The Pruitt Award Is an empty champagne bottle surrounded by plastic ice, which is also a fully functioning lamp.
Was the art world ready for its Oscar moment? Regardless of that answer, the first annual Art Awards presented by Rob Pruitt took place last night in the Guggenheim’s rotunda.
A few choice members of the Hollywood glitterati (Kylie Mingoue, Julianne Moore, James Franco) blended into triviality among the bevy of art celebrities that were in attendance. As an extra perquisite, Rob Pruitt recruited as emcees the Delusional Downtown Divas, a satiric troupe of young, hipster women with an art-world pedigree (and a winsome schoolgirl crush on fellow presenter Jeffrey Deitch). In videos interspersed between the presentations, the Divas schemed to infiltrate the art establishment by any means possible. In one segment that was an animated homage to From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, they pitched a tent in the Guggenheim, doing their laundry and shaving their legs in the lobby fountain. In another, they made a pilgrimage to the downtown studio of a wryly shamanic Joan Jonas, deadpanning, “How do you know when you’re performing and when you’re just walking down the street?”
Ms. Jonas took home a lifetime achievement award, as did the curator Kasper Konig. Since the main categories weren’t split along the lines of actor/actress, everyone was keeping an eye on the gender balance, though, in the end, the women nominees ended up taking the majority of the awards home.
The Delusional Downtown Divas and Rob Pruitt
The Kanye-West moment of the evening was undoubtedly art vandal-turned gallery owner Tony Shafrazi’s acceptance speech for Best Group Show of the Year for Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Upon taking the stage, Mr. Shafrazi narrowly escaped being pummeled with a dinner roll. His speech was peppered with jeers from spectators, clearly mesmerized by his egregiously narcissistic discourse, “I’ve probably known for a long time that I was great. This award comes as no great surprise to me.” Known more for his scandalous track record than his curatorial capabilities, Shafrazi was arrested in 1974 for spray painting “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica when it was on display in the Museum of Modern Art. On the matter of destroying a priceless work of art, he says “I wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life. Maybe that’s why the Guernica action remains so difficult to deal with. I tried to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; I wanted to dwell within the act of the painting’s creation, get involved with the making of the work, put my hand within it and by that act encourage the individual viewer to challenge it, deal with it and thus see it in its dynamic raw state as it was being made, not as a piece of history.” And this was only one of the evening’s colorful winners/presenters.
The 200 guests enjoyed a seated three-course dinner that accompanied the show, and resulted in sucking a lot of energy out of the room, as did the monotone and banal acceptance speeches that seemed to drag on endlessly, the background music to cut long speeches short seemingly overlooked. Guests perked up briefly when Mr. Pruitt bestowed the “The Rob Pruitt Award,” voted on by a committee of one. It went to the artist Cynthia Plaster Caster, who has been making casts of rock stars’ genitalia for decades and is the subject of an upcoming documentary. Ms. Plaster Caster brandished her masterpiece, the Jimi Hendrix, on the podium as Mr. Pruitt giggled, confident that though first awards shows can be bumpy, he had successfully negotiated his way through the ceremony and had begun paving the way for next year. You could see him stealthily reclaiming ownership of the event, reminding guests that the art world will never take itself as seriously as Hollywood.
The final list of winners is:
- Artist of the Year: Mary Heilmann
- Curator of the Year: Connie Butler
- Exhibition Outside the United States: Jeff Koons, Versailles, Château de Versailles, France
- Group Show of the Year, Gallery: Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
- Group Show of the Year, Museum: The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- New Artist of the Year: Ryan Trecartin
- The Rob Pruitt Award: Cynthia Plaster Caster
- Solo Show of the Year, Gallery: Manzoni: A Retrospective, Gagosian Gallery, New York
- Solo Show of the Year, Museum: Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Writer of the Year: Jerry Saltz
