Reforms needed to ‘rehabilitate’ top artistic honor

For several weeks now, we’ve been getting “insider” reports that, despite pleas for reforms before coming up with the next batch of National Artists, the selection process has been initiated and concluded, with the new laureates already chosen and awaiting President Aquino’s affirmation.

If there’s truth to these reports, all we can do now is to request our enlightened chief executive to defer officially actualizing the new awards until after the much-needed reforms in the selection process are comprehensively discussed and effected.

We say the President is enlightened, because he’s among the very few chief executives (the only other exception was his mother) who scrupulously refrained from interfering with the peer-driven selection process. We see this as a hopeful sign that he would see the key importance of restoring the country’s top artistic honor to its former prestige and unassailable credibility.

In previous reform-oriented discussions, we observed that fully one-third of past verdicts, notoriously including the last, most controversial batch, were questionable, and this stringent comment wasn’t debunked by the discussants. —That’s how serious the awards’ credibility problem has become over the years, no thanks to all sorts of additions, subtractions, insertions and subjective adumbrations that have pulled it down to an unacceptably low level.

So, reforms aren’t just called for, they are essential to the awards’ restored reliability—and even their viability.

The stringent logic here is, if the awards are no longer a reliable touchstone for artistic excellence in this country, why continue to hand them out at all?

Contributions

We would hate to see the awards lose any more credibility, because genuine artists have a hard life in the Philippines, so they deserve to be amply and officially rewarded for their selfless, visionary contributions.

But, new awardees have to be as deserving as past honorees, otherwise everyone will end up holding on to a discredited trophy—and an empty bag.

What exactly are the reforms that have to be effected? First, some of the preselectors are “purists” who prevent some excellent artists from being considered for the award. Second, some “artists” try to make it more through connections and “push and pull” than for genuine artistic achievement.

Others are more effective as educators and organizers, not creative artists; “colonially” bank more on “international” cachet than on being creative here; are not consistent in the level of their output—etc.

As far as the final selectors are concerned, some are not all that knowledgeable about high-level artistic activity in these parts; delegate their all-important tasks to assistants; are biased in favor of certain educational or artistic institutions—etc.

For these and other reasons, including official “insertions” made by past presidents and their respective coteries, the National Artist awards urgently need to be reformed and rehabilitated, to make sure that its next nominees and awardees more authentically reflect the highest level of authentic Filipino artistic activity.