Nicole Caruth is a freelance writer and curator living in New York and frequent contributor to the Art21 blog. She’ll walk around ArtPrize, observe, listen and write about her experience here. Nicole’s thoughts and opinions are her own and in no way represent an endorsement or objection from ArtPrize toward an individual artist or venue.

The first round of voting has ended. The streets have quieted down. The final contenders have been announced.

Hours before people hit the streets last night, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mary Jane Jacob, Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She raised a question that you might find interesting at this point in time: Would you vote for people the same way you vote for works of art? That is, if you were voting for an individual artist as opposed to an object would that change your vote?

Consider this: American Idol, a recurring reference here, is in part built on the idea of promoting and nurturing an artist’s career. Singers compete for a major recording contract that will allow them to grow as professional entertainers. The final reward is based not on a single work, but a body of work exhibited over time. This is also what many, though not all, art prizes do. They consider an artist’s demonstrated accomplishments on the whole and/or the possibility for achievement. If ArtPrize’s cash pot had been established to recognize and support artists future potential, or as someone wrote in a recent comment “commitment to a craft,” would you cast your vote the same way? Long term artistic capability and best in show are very different value systems. I believe the former is more significant.

I realize that votes in this first year are, as Rick DeVos stated tonight, “a means to an end” and that end is the conversation. But now that the conversation has started, like Jacob, I wonder and worry what will happen with the top 10 artists, especially the grand prize winner, after all is said and done. Will voters, curators and the media follow what these artists do and where they go? To be more frank, will people care after the excitement dies down? Who will be the Clive Davis, the mentor, for the winning artists here? As Jacob said to me “artists need money,” but it takes more than that for an artist to grow.

Every guest speaker that I’ve interviewed over the last several days  — Jacobs, Adam Weinberg, Peter Murray, Michael Kaiser and David Collins — agreed (without help from me) that the next step for ArtPrize is to define its mission, and the only way to figure that out is to keep the experiment going. I’m glad to hear that next year’s ArtPrize has already been announced.