Long Live the Lottery?!
What If…
A no-go: being given the opportunity to exhibit your work simply because you won a lottery, not because you were chosen. And yet being chosen—becoming one of the select few—is the ultimate goal, especially for artists. This principle underlies admission processes for art schools, gallery programs, and government grants, the purpose of curators, and the aura of the private, speculative art market. Only the chosen ones are deemed worthy. They are set apart from the rest precisely because the others have not been chosen.
Artists Hannes Egger and Thomas Sterna turned this idea on its head. They organized a lottery and rented a gallery space at Kassel KulturBahnhof during Documenta fifteen, leaving it to chance to decide who would exhibit—and thirteen winners emerged. While the lottery initially targeted professional artists, participation was open to all. How could anyone define what a professional artist is anyway? Are there any objectively measurable standards that can be applied fairly to everyone? Some may be fortunate enough to live off their art yet be self-taught. Others may have studied under renowned artists but lack gallery representation or collectors. And so, everybody was welcome. As a result, the winners included an entire family and a medical student. Each winner could choose to exhibit their own work or pass on their ticket to someone else. Instead of relying on curation, the aim was to embrace the greatest possible degree of randomness and variety. Egger and Sterna soon realized that these fringe spaces were the most compelling. The selection wasn’t based on artworks, connections—knowing the right people—, or résumés. Chance cast a wide net. Amateurs, outsiders, previously unseen artists, and non-artists were able to emerge. In this way, Kassel KulturBahnhof became a bold statement against elitist exhibition practices, against high-barrier, overpriced art fairs, against trend-driven selections, cancel culture, and less than transparent jury decisions.
Of course, the art world likes to see itself as open and diverse. However, it is clear that it is neither fair nor democratic. Older artists, mothers, artists whose appearance does not conform to conventional beauty standards, those who are shy and struggle to market themselves as “People”, and many others who lack the right connections or, for some reason, do not fit into the current zeitgeist—all face discrimination.
Egger and Sterna often speak about room for possibility. Naturally, this means the winners first and foremost. But this new exhibition model didn’t just offer them the chance to develop and showcase works; it also gave the art world a chance to experience something different, to shift perspectives, discover new things, be inspired, and allow fresh voices to be heard. However, this also presupposes an ideal—something worthy of a film, like the story of a poor man, perhaps even homeless, who was never given a chance and whose great, authentic talent is only discovered now, at over sixty years of age. Someone whose experience on the streets and at the margins of society has made him incorruptible and genuine. Someone able to scratch beneath the surface of the elitist, often fake gloss of the art world in an impressive way, whose work moves, and whose talent captivates. His life would fundamentally change through this lottery. He would finally obtain the success and recognition he deserves: a dream story for the annals of art history.
On the other hand, it could also go the other way. There could be bad winners: people who are not authentic but trivially and foolishly imitate the mainstream, producing work that is truly boring and superficial. Or even worse: what if a populist were to win and use their exhibition to spread the message that Arabs eat their neighbors’ dogs, cats, and pets? Where would censorship begin? What would still be democratic? And even if sensible censorship were to be applied sparingly and only when deemed absolutely necessary, it wouldn’t guarantee that the lottery would produce only exciting art. Mathematically speaking, it’s more likely that better artists could be found among the larger pool of losing tickets. Could this lead to a counter-exhibition by the artists who’d lost?
Taking this into account, is the Win-Win Lottery really a good model? Should it be adopted by institutions, museums, and galleries? These are important questions—questions that can be better discussed when artists such as Egger and Sterna dare to experiment and venture into the unknown with projects like the Win-Win Lottery. Such projects, too, are reflective, self-critical spaces of possibility. If problems and perhaps also limitations are brought to light, then real spaces for discourse can open, posing fundamental questions about democracy in the culture and art industries. Similar issues were raised, for example, by Frankfurt’s cultural councilor, Hilmar Hoffmann. Kultur für alle (Culture for all) was not only the title of his famous 1979 publication, it was also his life motto. His goal of lowering the threshold for access to the arts and culture led to the opening of district libraries, cinemas, and alternative spaces, setting new standards for understanding cultural policy. Art and cultural studies scholar Nora Sternfeld has engaged deeply with the question of democracy in museums, art schools, and the culture industry. Her words are highly relevant in these times—to quote from her essay “Eine Demokratie lernen, die es noch nicht gibt”(Learning a democracy that does not yet exist): “Imagine we were equal, and were only made unequal by circumstance. By circumstances that go out of their way to make distinctions. With an ever-increasing number of calculating machines and data networks, in this knowledge economy—of whose industry learning is now part—, it doesn’t even seem possible that some find themselves equal in inequality.”1
And what might the future of the lottery hold? Perhaps a combination—annual programs of curated and raffled exhibitions. Perhaps the best, most democratic approach lies in finding a middle ground. Or perhaps there are entirely different ways. What matters is that we critically rethink and change the established, unfair barriers to the visible art world once and for all. We must keep gambling to find and test new approaches and learn from all this. The raffle drum will not stand still—with tickets not just for artists, but maybe also for museums and institutions, allowing them to win new curatorial concepts and alternative democratic approaches.
1 Sternfeld, Nora (2020). “Eine Demokratie lernen, die es noch nicht gibt,” in Making Democracy – Aushandlungen von Freiheit, Gleichheit und Solidarität im Alltag, edited byElke Rajal, Oliver Marchart, Nora Landkammer and Carina Maier (transcript Verlag, 2020), 205f
Hannes Egger 