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[B] Blotner's Typescript Version / Brodsky Collection
This award is to me a source of double pleasure, in that it is not simply a recognition of work done over long years in a demanding craft, but also because of itself apart, by its name and nature, it recognizes, I think, qualities most worthy of the artist's striving and man's cherishing. The substance of which the tangible embodiment of this award is formed can suggest many things: a system of finance, a long-gone politician's frenetic oratory, or the self-induced catastrophe of a mad king. But in the present context it suggests to me other, utterly different things. It is redolent of the past, of those distant days of quasi-innocence when the world's fairs at which medals were awarded were rare and almost magical happenings and not giant commercial enterprises occuring more often than presidential elections. It suggests not just the faded airs and rotogravures that record the vanished splendor which briefly crowned St. Louis or Leipzig. It evokes the qualities they celebrated, immortalized thereafter on labels identifying everything from great vintages to nonpareil pickle relishes.
I think that those gold medals—and their cousin-german counterparts, the shining blue ribbons that glittered on the tables of myriad forgotten county fairs—recognized qualities which, though they are still present today when the earth is worked like a mine and the factories begin to be worked by machines, were more clearly seen and more highly honored than they are today. Apart from the old testamental virtues, venerated in colony and frontier, these qualities cluster around the idea of individuality of a kind of excellence compounded of resourcefulness, independence, and complete uniqueness.
So, today when roads get shorter and neighbors closer, needs better provided for and range more circumscribed, it seems to me a good time to remember the qualities denoted by the gold medals of the last century. And I think it is vital for them to be a part of the artist and his work—for him and for those who read it—individuality and independence, to go beside the other qualities
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