Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art

There is no form of cultural capital so ubiquitous, so powerful, so widely talked about, and yet so little explored by scholars as the cultural prize. Prizes and awards fairly dominate the cultural landscape these days, literally tens of thousands of them vying for our notice, lists of them appearing in every resumé, every promotional blurb, every feature story or obituary of practically anyone connected with the production of art. 1 Indeed, the sense that the cultural universe has become super-saturated with prizes, that there are more prizes than our collective cultural achievements can possibly justify, is the great and recurring theme of prize punditry. Gore Vidal says that in the U.S. there are more literary prizes than there are writers. 2 Peter Porter, the Australian poet, says there are so many prizes in his country that "there is hardly any writer in Sydney who has not won one." 3 A British novelist jokes about attending a "great literary function" in Bloomsbury where he turned out to be "one of only two fiction writers present never to have won a literary award," and where the other such writer was managing to go undetected by laying claim to an award of his own invention--the "Pemberton-Frost Memorial Prize." 4 The author thus found himself in a perfect comic inversion of the normative prize scenario: a single loser emerging from a congested field of winners. The whole literary awards scene, as numerous commentators have observed, has come to resemble the "Caucus-race" of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the Dodo announces that "everybody has won, and all must have prizes." 5