In this season of recognition and prizes, I found this excerpt from a New Yorker article on book awards enlightening:

… the complaint that the award had been given to the wrong writer … is as old as literary prizes themselves…. When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition…. [W]hen people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one.

In short, art is determined in part by “middlemen”, those who designate what art is valuable and what isn’t, but if you pay too much attention to how these designations are awarded, you’re revealing the people behind the curtain and attacking the foundation of what we mean by art.