Invisible touch
Submitted by Secret Society
The NYT Arts Beat blog can’t avoid unburying the lede:
He may not particularly need the money, but the tenor Plácido Domingo has been named the winner of the first Birgit Nilsson Prize, which bestows its recipient with a $1 million award for outstanding achievement in classical music, the Birgit Nilsson Foundation said in a release on Friday.
Domingo was personally selected by the late Ms. Nilsson as the first recipient of this prize (subsequent winners of the most lucrative award in classical music will be “nominated by a jury and selected by the foundation’s board”) — well gosh, that certainly dispels any petty concerns anyone may have had about back-channel chumminess trumping “outstanding achievement in classical music.”
It’s worth asking: what, exactly, is the point of this kind of award, beyond astonishing the proles with its magnitude? Does it do anything to improve the health and vitality of classical music? Or is this better understood as an attempt by the Birgit Nilsson Foundation and its board to make a bit of a splash by handing out double the MacArthur coin?
Of course, the MacArthur Foundation awards 25 fellowships a year, and not all of them to folks for whom a million-dollar windfall is like a light breeze wafting through their bank account. Why, you’d almost think the MacArthur Fellowships are about actually trying to make a difference in the world, not merely the courting of prestige and influence.
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