Trying to clear things up

Howdy!

I got a phone call this morning from someone who thought I had written something negative about their work on this here blog. As I told them, I do my best not to criticize art that I haven't seen (which does not mean that I won't have an opinion on it if I haven't seen it). And in fact what I was attempting to do was criticize the work of the publicists of The RBC Canadian Art Prize.

Back in April I wrote this post, where I completely forgot about the RBC thing-ys (first piece of evidence that they have some work to do). And now, that they have named this year's winner (which ain't anywhere on their website!) we can do a little test.

Etienne Zack, the most recent winner gets about 727 hits on Google.
Jeremy Deller, the most recent winner of the Turner Prize gets about 93,700 hits on Google.
Dionne Simpson, last year's winner of the RBC Canadian Art prize gets about 420 hits on Google. (And she got shafted in other ways, too, as when she won it, the prize was only worth $10K).
Heck! Let's take a slightly more obscure prize, the Lucelia Artist Award. Their last winner was Andrea Zittel. Conveniently it tosses off $25,000, too. Ms. Zittel gets about 38,400 hits on Google.
How many hits on Google do you think Mr. Zack will get at this time next year?

So, to sum this all up for the phone caller (and anybody else who is interested) from my perspective the RBC would be better served keeping its money, instead of trying to convince anyone that the are promoting Canadian Art in any meaningful fashion.