I Won a Prize. So What?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/opinion/prizes-culture-art.html

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Ah, the magical season of prizes is once again upon us.

Each spring brings, along with warm rains and budding flowers, Fulbrights, Rhodeses, Pulitzers and Guggenheims, as well as Oscars, Tonys and Indies — which are thought of so fondly they come with their own nicknames.

Everybody, it seems, loves honors and prizes. And they certainly make for great entertainment. The award ceremonies for literary prizes are usually demure, decorous little things, but award shows on TV are like a country music hoedown. And the Oscars rank so high in the culture that actors measure their worth by rehearsing their acceptance speeches.

Is there anything seriously wrong with all of this? Not that I can see. Winning a prize is an undeniably thrilling, magical thing. It is, in essence, the world’s way of telling you that you’ve done something noteworthy and valuable. It’s your moment to shine.

But on the whole, do prizes do any good? Are they shallow or meaningful? Motivating or stultifying? Would the minds and achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, Vermeer or van Gogh have suffered chilling effects from winning prizes? What if Beethoven had squatted on his haunches after receiving a lifetime achievement award for his Fourth Symphony?

A former colleague of mine, the writer Henry Mitchell, once wrote, “The only thing I know about prizes is that Mozart never won one” — implying that prizes are beneath the achievement of the truly divine, who win eternity.

Still, there’s no denying the strange, unearthly sensation that occurs when you win a prize — no matter how small.

When I was 12, I won the senior riding trophy at an equestrian summer camp. When the competitors had finished the dressage — riding in different gaits and jumping — the judges conferred and announced the winners, starting with fifth place. By the time they got to third, I figured I was out of the running. Then they announced first place, and … what?!

All these years later, I can still recreate the blushing disbelief, the same rush of blood, I felt on that warm, damp evening in the Poconos. It was an extraordinary feeling. I had won something.

In April, I won a Guggenheim fellowship, and experienced the same feeling all over again. I was, of course, grateful to win. It came as a sweet surprise. In a way, all prizes are just that: sweet surprises.

I believe the singular feeling that comes with winning a prize is a result of the fact that — however great one’s talent may be — no one really thinks he deserves a prize. The event transports you briefly to a world of other people.

Perhaps that is the key to understanding the allure of prizes and their magical effect on us. Prizes are, like the love of a superior mate, things you win but don’t deserve.

That said, while prizes of all shapes and sizes may inspire a similar thrill, they are not all created equal. Different ones mean different things.

A Nobel or Pulitzer, for instance, says, “Congrats, you’ve hit the jackpot!” while a Fulbright or Rhodes says, “Congrats, you’ve only just begun to live!” A Guggenheim says, “Congrats, good work so far, keep it up!” And then, of course, there are those participation trophies that are offered to everyone and say, in effect, “Congrats, you’re breathing!”

On the positive side, prizes have, over the years, yielded some memorable acceptance speeches — utterances that might not have been made without the occasion of the prize.

At the banquet celebrating the Nobels on Dec. 10, 1950, William Faulkner said that an award should be thought of as for the work, not for the individual — “a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit … to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

The mere existence of prizes implies that there is such a thing as bright excellence, which, in a world that is tearing itself apart daily, means we were made for better stuff than knocking one another off.

In the pages of this newspaper, on any given day, one can find announcements of artistic distinctions alongside coverage of wars, starvation, human madness and cruelty. Which stories matter more? The answer is obvious. Still, think how much grimmer the world would be if there were no prizewinners to announce, if we didn’t take a moment to celebrate those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of some noble or beautiful goal.

But what about those who do not win prizes? This much larger group may not be all Mozarts, but they do suggest the essential meaning and tension in winning a prize: For every winner, there are many, many others who go unrecognized.

We should take care to assign prizes their proper weight, to neither mistake them for meaning too much nor too little. A prize is a wonderful thing, but it is the work, and the artist’s commitment to it, that matters.

Last week, I received a letter from a writer friend who lamented the trouble he has had getting his work recognized. He said he felt so demoralized that he was going to quit writing altogether.

He won’t, of course; that’s just something writers say. In fact, I suspect a part of him even enjoys being outside the recognizing, awarding world.

Most of the artists I know relish their outsider status, and winning a prize says, among other things, “Welcome to the fold.” Lovely as a prize may be, artists want out — the freedom, independence, orneriness, antagonism or whatever of being removed from the establishment that, by its very nature, winning a prize welcomes you to.

My friend will stew for a while, and out of that stew will come something beautiful. I’d bet the farm on it (if I had a farm). And if that beautiful thing finally wins him an award, great. And if it doesn’t, who cares? It will still be a beautiful thing, a prize in itself.

Roger Rosenblatt is an essayist, a novelist and a 2023 Guggenheim fellow.

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