"Rusty’s my horse," said Amenta. He asked me which work I had voted for. It was about three minutes to midnight, when the voting would end. I realized, through a haze of martinis, that not only had I not voted, I had not even gone online to confirm my registration.[How can one hope to comment with any authority on the validity of a democratic process and stand idly aside while it unfolds? Journalistic impartiality or no, I had as much a right as anyone to cast my vote for the winner. I wanted to join the conversation, too. I fumbled with my phone, drunkenly trying to log on to the ArtPrize website as the seconds ticked away. Kronschlaeger and Amenta were right: It must be Rusty. That puppy was all heart. But my voice was not to be heard. By the time I reached the voting page, it was 12:01 a.m. The polls were closed.

The following night, there was a sold-out gala awards ceremony at the DeVos Performance Hall. A dance troupe did a snappy Jazz Age number, though there was some problem with the timing of the curtain, and it closed on them in the middle of their bows. The eight jury prizes, $7,000 in a range of categories, were handed out—a sort of bone thrown to the arbiters of critical taste and judgment. In a surprise and unorthodox move, the administrators had at the last minute added a special juried category, Outstanding Venue. Site:Lab, though snubbed by the voting public, was given the nod.

Finally the moment arrived. Rick DeVos took the stage. He first addressed the grumbling over the top ten. "I see dissent and discord as functions of a larger narrative," he said, reading from a teleprompter screen that scrolled in the back of the auditorium. "This tension between populism and professionalism is at the core of ArtPrize." Where else would the front page of a local newspaper or half a TV news broadcast discuss contemporary art every day for two weeks? This was the real point of the endeavor, DeVos argued, not the winner. And then he opened the envelope.

"And the moment you’ve all been waiting for...Mia Tavonatti, Crucifixion!" The crowd erupted in thunderous applause. Kronschlaeger, sitting next to me, shook his head and slumped in his seat. "It’s a disaster."

At the press conference afterward, two local reporters joked to each other, "They should rename it PanderFest. Next year I’m submitting a painting of Jesus, Gerald Ford, and Rick DeVos."

Two months later, DeVos would announce that for 2012 a $100,000 juried prize would be added to the contest. The top prize would be reduced to $200,000 and would still be up to public vote, but it was hard not to see the change as at least a partial concession that the experiment, in its purest free-market form, had failed. The chasm between DeVos’s Silicon Valley–like faith in the wisdom of crowdsourcing and his stated love for creative expression is wide, and perhaps no amount of money, however innovative its disbursement, can span it. If you ask the crowd what pleases them most, you get crowd-pleasing dreck.

Another view: If it really is Rick’s "creative act," perhaps ArtPrize is a masterful piece of performance art, a carnivalesque happening of the sort Warhol would have loved, sly and subversive precisely because of its preposterous openness, a giant papier-mâché middle finger rising out of flyover country, gesturing toward the bastions of the elite. But who is DeVos fighting for? It is not yet clear whether he really shares the cultural agenda laid out by Rich and Dick before him. Is ArtPrize his elaborate way of becoming his own person, of working within a system of interfamilial patronage while subverting its more controlling aims? Or will Rick, at some point, tuck in his shirt, comb his hair down, and assume the mantle of his station?

At the afterparty, in the gargantuan DeVos Place ballroom, I caught one last glimpse of him. Standing alone beside an ice sculpture bearing the ArtPrize logo—which, finished hours earlier, had begun to melt—he was bopping along halfheartedly to "Come On Eileen" and drinking a Stella Artois as a thickset bodyguard stood silently by.

Matthew Power is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.