Why do we do it? Why do we crown a “World Champion of Magic” every four years? More than that, how do we do it? When I first wrote this article two years ago—much like most of my first drafts—it read like chicken scratch from a miffed, brooding teenager. But when I thought about it further, I think past me was on to something.
The stupidly simple, yet cynical, answer would be to say: “It helps in marketing. Duh.” While there’s some truth to this, I still wanted to put on my anthropologist hat and ask a much more poignant question: What do awards do for an entire artistic culture?
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