Its Prize Season (It's Always Prize Season): A Brief Recherche du tapis rouge perdu

 

Pix credit here

 

It is prize season. People like to see others receive them.  It is quite reassuring.  And fun.  especially when the prizing is enveloped in the sort of theatricality that brings out the most delightfully playful in us.  It is actually quite exciting; enough, perhaps, to get me interested in whatever achievement it was that earned for its recipients their prize.

Its sights, and smells, and performances called to mind a memory of  different time and place, and space.

Mais j’avais beau savoir que je n’étais pas dans les demeures dont l’ignorance du réveil m’avait en un instant sinon présenté l’image distincte, du moins fait croire la présence possible, le branle était donné à ma mémoire; généralement je ne cherchais pas à me rendormir tout de suite; je passais la plus grande partie de la nuit à me rappeler notre vie d’autrefois, à Combray chez ma grand’tante, à Balbec, à Paris, à Doncières, à Venise, ailleurs encore, à me rappeler les lieux, les personnes que j’y avais connues, ce que j’avais vu d’elles, ce qu’on m’en avait raconté. (Marcel Proust, A la Rechcherche du temps perdu (Du Côté de Chez Swann), §1.).

It called to mind a text from a long lost time, and space, one a bit more sulfurous perhaps, but altogether alive on ts own domains. It called to mind this:

Maybe won the Medal of Honor the George Cross even the Nobel but once you've been stigmatized with the ultimate seal of mediocrity your obit will read Pulitzer Prize  Novelist Dies at whatever because  they're not advertising the winner no. No, like this whole plague of prizes wherever you look, it's the prize givers promoting themselves, trying to rescue their thoroughly discredited profession of journalism. . . The prize winner? They're just props , cartoonists, sports writers, political pundits, front page photos the bloodier the better for that instant of fame wrap the fish in tomorrow, good God how many Pulitzer Prizes are there?(William Gaddis, Agapē Agape (Penguin, 2003), p. 60).

Pix credit here

In the age of virtual reproduction, one has moved beyond the commodification of every aspect of life, the bete noire of the passing page of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) to its mimesis in digitalized virtual space. There it acquires a life that though it appears to mirror, takes on its own characteristics. In the age of virtual reproduction, mimesis produces an inversion of sorts--in this age the prize is the art; and art is the object that is the essential ingredient of the prize. Where pre-21st century capitalism--of either the liberal democratic or Marxist-Leninist sort--produced and consumed art by detaching its autonomous genius from its production (in an age of mass consumption); contemporary modalities produce and consume prizes, for which art is necessary. The art is in the reward--the prize, the praise; that art form takes on a new life in virtual space where it can be savored and--not reproduced--but revisited; an infinite loop of a moment in time made memorable by the effort undertaken to produce it, its forms and rituals. 

Pix credit New York Times

. . . and the clothes--the art of wrapping producers of other art forms in signifiers (my clothing signals my engagement in and as art) that embodies the art they produced for the production of the art of the reward, the art of collective recognition and the material gain that accompanies that and completes the circle of art. The clothes. Consumable signs.