Who won the 1976 Olympic Summer Games gold medal for trapshooting? Or the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics. What about the 1999 Caldecott Medal? Don’t know? Neither do I. I’d hazard a guess that the only people who remember are the people that won them. Which makes me think, what are awards for?
Awards are everywhere. Every industry has them. You could be Real Estate Agent of the Year, Accountant of the Year, Plumber of the Year, Advertising Agency of the Year, Pinot Noir of the Year, the list goes on. It’s not that humans are fickle; we simply like feedback. We want to be noticed. To know that we matter. We invented awards because, well, we like to be seen.
But we don’t care if someone else is seen, especially when they aren’t ‘competition’. It’s probably why I don’t know who won the 2010 Australian Open Tennis, or the 1982 Academy Award for Best Film Score. All we care is that we’re seen, not someone else.
Social media uses likes and follows. They’re a type of award doled out by companies like Facebook to encourage you to keep going. To tell you that, “yes, you’re doing it right, you understand the algorithm.” What it really means is that “you’re helping us generate ad revenue. Thanks.”
But making art has to be different. Telling stories need an authenticity that isn’t driven by the judging panel’s criteria. It has to come from within. Recognition is nice, sure, but not at the cost of telling the best stories; of working out, for yourself, how you exist in this world.