“Good for Them and Great for Us”: Win-Win Lottery – On Exhibiting by Draw
From June 18 to September 25, 2022, the two South Tyrol-based artists Hannes Egger and Thomas Sterna conducted a participatory art project in Kassel, running parallel to Documenta fifteen. They rented a sixty-square-meter exhibition space at Kassel KulturBahnhof, which was raffled off to artists, curators, and exhibition organizers for their projects. Raffle tickets, which were also a limited-edition art project in itself, cost twenty euros each and could be purchased through the website http://www.winwinlottery.org. The ticket sales raised a total of approximately 6.000 euros, with an additional private donation of 5.000 euros. There was no other institutional or governmental funding. Thirteen individual art exhibitions were raffled and presented both on the website and in the gallery space in Kassel for one week each. The winners had four weeks to prepare their exhibitions. Set-up took place on Thursdays, opening nights were on Fridays, and Wednesdays were reserved for taking down the displays. The artists were responsible for organizing guards for their own slots.
Thanks to the synergy effect of Documenta fifteen, the number of visitors was no doubt higher than it would have been without this “side effect”. The organizers estimate at least twenty to thirty visitors per day, which amounts to roughly 2,000 to 3,000 over the one hundred days the project ran—an impressive figure for such a collateral event. Egger and Sterna called their art project Win-Win Lottery, selling a total of three hundred tickets. The winners were drawn in three online raffles, the first of which took place on May 6, 2022, from a pool of 152 tickets. Participants were allowed to purchase multiple tickets in order to increase their chances of winning an exhibition slot or to gift the prize to someone else—an option that some winners did in fact choose. For example, a member of the mayoral candidate’s campaign team in Ancona, Italy, won one of the raffles. He wanted to use his ticket for the campaign, so he gave his prize to two local artists he met by chance on the beach in Ancona.
The art world is a system based on exclusion, not inclusion. There can only be one star, not thousands, and curators determine who gets to participate. But since trends are short-lived, people are dropped by the system just as quickly. The attention span in contemporary art is extremely short. Many counter-concepts aim to challenge this concentration of power: artists’ studio and off-spaces, as well as artist-run galleries have an astonishingly long tradition, some going back two hundred years.1 These spaces offer a more democratic way for artists to participate in exhibitions, typically through voting in a social group or community. Thomas Sterna and Hannes Egger took a different approach. For their participatory art project Win-Win Lottery, they randomly selected the artists by drawing lots. The chances of winning were proportional to the number of exhibitions that could be held during the project’s duration and the number of people who acquired the right to enter the draw by purchasing a ticket. Statistically speaking, the odds of winning an exhibition slot weren’t bad—one in twenty-three with the purchase of a single ticket.
The term “win-win” originated from the so-called Negotiation Project developed at Harvard Law School in the 1980s for negotiation scenarios.2 In a win-win negotiation, the goal is to achieve the best possible outcome for yourself while ensuring that the other party is also satisfied. Drawing lots also has a long history, dating back to ancient Greece.3 It is a method for making decisions and is widespread across many areas of society. Lotteries are particularly useful when the supply of goods or services is scarcer than the demand. Exhibition space is, in principle, a scarce resource that cannot be multiplied at will. Therefore, the lottery entails both opportunities and limitations.4
This art project serves as an artistic critique of elitism in contemporary art, of the exclusivity of its selection practices, and the mass-media promotion of its superstars. Collectors enhance their image—i.e., their reputation and symbolic capital—by purchasing high-priced works of art exclusively, even when the purchase is made for speculative purposes. No market is as opaque and poorly regulated as the international art market.
In principle, this art project challenges elitists and exclusivist notions of art. Art is not selected by experts but by a lottery—in other words, by chance. Such an approach is a massive affront to the “quality” in art, which can only be ensured through “rigorous” selection. The concept of art quality is a highly ideological battle cry often invoked in curatorial power struggles. Here, the community of lottery buyers takes on the role of the acting sovereign. By buying a ticket, they acquire the right to command over this scarce resource—the exhibition space—and control it for their own profit. Of course, there is always the question of the cost-benefit ratio: Does the expected benefit of my investment outweigh the cost in terms of time and money?
In sociology, there’s the concept of the homo oeconomicus, who bases social actions on expected benefits. According to this model, humans—as social beings—are utility maximizers.5 To better understand the complexity of a win-win situation, we need to distinguish between the different types of capital in society. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identifies three different types of capital that can be used to generate benefit: economic, cultural, and social capital.6 When these types of capital become visible to others, they also transform into symbolic capital—visible markers that manifest as image and reputation.7 The most familiar type of capital is economic and takes the form of wealth and property. Cultural capital, expressed through education and titles, can exist in three forms: first, as embodied cultural capital in the form of knowledge, skills, and experience. Cultural capital can also take the form of material objects, such as paintings, sculptures, graphics, texts, instruments, or machines, which is known as objectified cultural capital and can be acquired through purchase or taking possession. Lastly, the third form is institutionalized cultural capital expressed as academic degrees. Cultural goods like paintings and sculptures can therefore also be tools in conflicts over cultural production and social class.8 Finally, social capital exists in the form of relationships—institutionalized networks that provide connections and recognition.9
What profit or benefit did the lottery winners gain for themselves? First of all, the participants had to make an investment. They had to transport their works to Kassel, find accommodation, set up the displays, manage press and public relations, and keep watch over the exhibition during opening hours. This required an investment of both time and money. On the other hand, the benefits included the accumulation of objectified cultural capital (the production of material goods in the form of artworks), symbolic capital in the form of image and reputation gain, and an increase in social capital through recognition, new connections, and the expansion of their existing social networks. Visitors, in turn, were able to increase their cultural capital through aesthetic experiences, knowledge, and educational gains. All they had to invest was time.
And what did the organizers gain from the project? The artists Hannes Egger and Thomas Sterna accomplished a semantic ascent. Instead of exhibiting their own works—which they could have done—they elevated themselves as artists to a meta-level, where they created the condition of possibility for others to exhibit. Their names remained invisible during the project. Thus, they stepped back behind the artists selected by the draw. Their primary benefit was an increase in symbolic capital in the form of greater visibility, recognition, and reputation, along with an expansion of their social capital by broadening their international network of connections, which, as they note, continues to this day. “Good for you, great for me.”
1 Huber, Hans Dieter. “Ausbruch aus einer bleiernen Zeit. Die Gründerjahre des Künstlerhauses Stuttgart,” in Künstlerhaus Stuttgart 40 Jahre 1978-2018, edited by Hannelore Paflik-Huber. Stuttgart, 2019, pp. 184-186.
2 Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Boston, Mass., 1981.
3 Sintomer, Yves: Das demokratische Experiment. Geschichte des Losverfahrens in der Politik von Athen bis heute. Wiesbaden: 2016; Gebler, Aron. Die Verwendung und Bedeutung von Losverfahren in Athen und im griechischen Raum vom 7. bis 5. Jahrhundert vor Chr. Stuttgart, 2024.
4 Esser, Hartmut. Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Volume 4: Opportunitäten und Restriktionen. Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2000.
5 Esser, Hartmut. Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Volume 1: Situationslogik und Handeln. Frankfurt am Main and New York: 1999, pp. 84-110.
6 Bourdieu, Pierre. “Ökonomisches Kapital – Kulturelles Kapital – Soziales Kapital,” in Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht. Schriften zu Politik & Kultur 1. Hamburg, 1992, pp. 49-79.
7 Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic J.D. Wacquant. Reflexive Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main, 1996, pp. 151f.
8 Bourdieu, Pierre. “Ökonomisches Kapital – Kulturelles Kapital – Soziales Kapital,” in Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht. Schriften zu Politik & Kultur 1. Hamburg, 1992, p.61.
9 Bourdieu, Pierre. “Ökonomisches Kapital – Kulturelles Kapital – Soziales Kapital,” in Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht. Schriften zu Politik & Kultur 1. Hamburg, 1992, pp. 63-70.
Hannes Egger 