It is beginning to feel like we have reached peak prize in the art world, with new awards and gongs being announced all the time. A glance across my inbox over the past couple of weeks reveals the winners of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, the AWARE Prize for women, and the Wi Di Mimba Wi Prize for artists of color in Germany; Canada’s Sobey Art Award nominees, Britain’s Turner Prize nominees; an open call for the 12th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize. The list seems endless. And that is before we go into the politically charged debacle over the Golden and Silver Lions at the Venice Biennale, this year being voted on by the public after the jury’s resignation.

While most of these awards are well established and have precise aims, the purpose of others is less clear. With their proliferation, discomfort in the idea of putting artists in competition with each other is growing, especially when the fight for finite resources in the nonprofit sector already risks undermining solidarity between peers. One artist who was recently nominated for a GBP 20,000 prize found the experience dispiriting. ‘Prizes cultivate the myth of both meritocracy and individualism when it comes to the arts. Neither of these are true!’ she tells me. The artist, who had to go through an awards ceremony but went home empty-handed, questions how something so speculative as art-making can be compared. The curator Diana Campbell agrees: ‘It’s all too subjective,’ she says, but adds that, if approached the right way, prizes can have a significant impact. Since 2012, Campbell has coordinated the Samdani Art Award during the biennial Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh, the format evolving, she says, into ‘a research tool and a gift to the field.’

‘If you look at the recent generation of emerging Bangladeshi artists,’ she continues, ‘they’re really visible within the international art world. I wouldn’t say you have the same visibility of, say, the same generation of Indian artists.’ She notes that Soma Surovi Jannat, winner of the 2020 prize, is currently the subject of a solo show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. ‘The first Bangladesh-based artist to have a solo exhibition in a UK museum.’

‘Sometimes the ones that don’t win, win more,’ Campbell adds. ‘Ashfika Rahman was nominated for multiple editions and never won, but she went on to win the USD 100,000 Future Generation Art Prize. Imagine what USD 100,000 is going to do in Bangladesh for community-orientated practice.’ 

Alex Farquharson, who has overseen the Turner Prize every year since he became director of Tate Britain in 2015, argues art prizes also benefit the public. The award has been running since 1984 and always proves to be a big media event, attracting excitement and criticism in equal measure. ‘The Turner gives the public direct access to four practices, it cuts through layers of gatekeepers, that’s what the appeal is,’ says Farquharson.

In 2018, I judged the prize myself. My jury was more invested in producing a cohesive shortlist than worried about who the eventual winner might be. I relished, for example, the chance to bring the politically engaged films of Naeem Mohaiemen to a wider audience in the UK, even if Charlie Prodger took home the trophy. Farquharson concurs: ‘The four artists on a given shortlist are often names that only art professionals know, because they tend to be on the cusp of things.’ And a nomination – or indeed a victory – can transform an artist’s visibility. Lubaina Himid’s 2017 Turner Prize win is a striking example: it brought a new level of public and institutional recognition to her rich but until then underappreciated practice, decades in the making.

In 2025, Art Basel inaugurated its own awards, presented by BOSS, which return this year to recognize 33 individuals across nine categories. Diana Campbell is among them, experiencing the prize process from the opposite side of the fence with a nomination for her curatorial work. Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs, argues that the Art Basel Awards offer something different, geared towards the whole cultural ecosystem. ‘We wanted to give visibility to the people who support the artists as well, the artists’ allies, cross-disciplinary figures who touch on the art world, the curators and writers, the museums, the patrons.’

Aziza Kadyri, who is honored in the emerging artist category – which is dedicated to artists – says the prospect of hanging out with the likes of writer Hilton Als, musician Laurie Anderson, and artist Howardena Pindell will be reward in itself. ‘I woke up to this email, and I couldn’t believe it was true, I thought someone was pulling a prank on me,’ she jokes. ‘I just see this as an opportunity for personal growth and perhaps to understand something about the people behind these big names.’ Kadyri says she gets the concern around prizes but ‘for emerging artists, they are valuable because, whether you want it or not, people do judge you by a CV at this point.’

De Bellis says he hopes that the process will imbue a sense of community over competition. ‘We invite all of them for 48 hours in Basel, and we organize time for them to spend together, we organize an introduction, dinners, excursions. There is a ceremony. They feel very much part of a class. It felt magical last year. Our aim is to create a cohort that really supports each other.’ 

From this final group, 11 Gold Awardees will be chosen, the Medalists voting among themselves, with the recipients announced at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. In a model that moves beyond traditional prize structures, Gold Awards in the artist categories provide over USD 250,000 annually in flexible support – spanning honorariums, philanthropic contributions, and ambitious public commissions - creating new opportunities for artists to realize work on a global stage.

Art Basel hopes that its unique voting procedure goes some way in addressing the difficulties inherent to the idea of judging art and cultural practices. For the Gold Awardees, it certainly gives a different flavor to the distinction. ‘There’s no better reward than being selected by your peers,’ says De Bellis. Whether Art Basel has got the structure right, he says, will ultimately be judged by the long-term legacy of the project. ‘If we have, there’s more interest, love, mutual support – elements which play a huge role within our industry’.