A Culture Of Prizes And Awards

“In the realm of literature and the arts, honors have been pullulating like kudzu. Worldwide, the number of movie prizes handed out each year – about 9,000 – is more than double the number of full-length movies produced, and literary prizes are being hatched at a faster rate than new books. The rise of prizes over the last century, and especially their feverish proliferation in recent decades, is one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success.”