Sometimes, You Just Can't Win

The organizers of the National Portrait Gallery's first competition have said that, in the 1960s heyday of great portraitists such as Lucien Freud, Alice Neel, Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz, they had little company as portrait painters who also made important art. Now, organizers argue, the situation is ever so much healthier than that.

After having seen this competition's finalists, that seems a stretch. But maybe that's not really the fault of the artists. The museum may have set things up to fail.

Maybe the worst move of all was to limit the contest to the old-fashioned arts of painting and sculpture. If you're simply looking for the best imaginable portrait art, why rule out all the photographic media that artists love to use these days? Some of the best artworks of recent years have been pictures of people, done in film and video and photography, by world-famous artists such as Nicholas Nixon, Jeff Wall, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Gillian Wearing and Fiona Tan as well as by Washington's own Colby Caldwell, a star of the last Corcoran Biennial (which was once a painting-only event but has now dropped that restriction). Most artists and curators are busy breaking down the old frontiers between media; they prefer to dwell on what is being said than on the techniques used to say it. Why build those borders up again in a competition said to be about proving the rebirth of portraiture as serious contemporary art?

Even if you're absolutely committed to paintings and sculptures, there are better ways of pulling in the best of them. Anyone who has juried an open competition, where your only way of getting entries is over the transom, knows that it is a lousy way to find good art, or to take the pulse of a healthy art scene. Artists of any note almost never enter them: They're busy enough not to need to. Also -- for good or ill -- even winning such an event is likely to have more stigma attached to it, in the serious art world, than glory. It would be like expecting an aspiring major league hitter to compete in wiffle ball -- what could be in it for him?

With an art world and art market absolutely desperate to winkle out the Next Big Thing, the idea that there's a ton of hidden genius lurking in the shadows is almost total myth.

-- Blake Gopnik