Are award shows still relevant?

Drake, Kanye West and Justin Bieber are boycotting the Grammys despite their multiple nominations, calling the show out of touch and irrelevant, writes Jane Watkins.

Some artists, including Justin Bieber, have decided to snub the Grammy Awards because the show is out of touch. (Pic: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for iHeartMedia)

A boycott of this year’s Grammys by its most famous nominees should be music to the ears of music fans everywhere.

This year Drake, Kanye West and Justin Bieber are snubbing the ceremony despite their multiple nominations and that’s what makes it so damning, reportedly condemning the awards for being, among other things, out of touch and irrelevant.

This is no small thing: Drake and West are each nominated for eight awards including best rap song and best rap album.

Bieber is up for album of the year, song of the year, best pop solo performance and best pop vocal album.

This marks a real turning point. Traditionally ceremonies such as the Grammys have (rightly) been treated with a measure of disdain by artists — that is, until they’re nominated for one and their ego lets them believe the awards have more importance than they deserve.

To put it another way, artists at the very top of their game are saying publicly that there is no such thing as a “best pop vocal album”, that there is no such thing as “best music”, even that there is no such thing as “best art”. At least there isn’t when all you can objectively measure is what is the most popular or the less popular work.

Kanye West was happy to accept a Grammy in 2008. But no more. (Pic: AFP/Robyn Beck)

The boycotted awards aren’t about being the “best”, not when they can only objectively measure your subjective taste and the collated data measuring the individual subjective tastes of about 12,000 eligible Grammy voters. Art is not a competition, but that’s what award shows try to turn it into.

In her recent and much-celebrated speech at the Golden Globes, actor Meryl Streep derided the world of non-artists outside the award show’s walls by mocking Mixed Martial Arts as not “real” art.

Ironically for Streep and those who cheered her, even if Mixed Martial Arts is not “art”, it is exactly what music and movie awards shows, like the Golden Globes and Grammys, turn art into. They turn it into a UFC match. They pit one person’s creativity against another’s and determine the winner, often contentiously, on points scored by a panel.

Art shouldn’t just be judged as skilfully executed or not skilfully executed. It’s meant to make you feel something.

Diana Ross, for example, is not the best technical singer in the world. She’s wasn’t even the best technical singer in The Supremes. She does, however, make beautiful heart-wrenching art with her voice.

We hold up reality TV singing contests like The Voice and the thankfully cancelled X Factor as if they were some genuine measure of artistry.

Goodbye (and good riddance) X Factor. (Pic: Supplied)

What the artist feels about their music or what their fans feel about the artist’s music is rendered irrelevant. What Iggy Azalea or Joel Madden or some anonymous Grammys voter thinks about the artist’s technical abilities in comparison with other artists’ abilities is what determines the worth of art when you make it a competition. Azalea, try as she might, can’t make definitive judgments on what is the best art.

Nor can Madden, nor Grammy voters, nor I, make definitive judgments beyond our own personal tastes. You may disagree with the artistic assessments in this article. You may hate The Ramones, love the UFC, hate expressionist painters and love every winner of every season of The Voice and The X Factor. And that’s completely valid because art is subjective.

What is a less valid disagreement to have, however, is that anyone’s personal taste makes some art the best or the worst objectively because, hate to sound like a broken record here, art is not a competition.