Johnny Depp, a $25,000 Art Prize, and the Voting Contest That Has Artists Walking Away
A new art competition called The People's Artist is offering a US$25,000 prize, a feature in Artforum magazine, and a showcase with The Art of Elysium, a Los Angeles-based charity. Actor Johnny Depp starred in a promotional video inviting artists to enter. Mixed-media artist Eric Polins won the inaugural contest and announced he would donate his $25,000 prize back to The Art of Elysium, according to a press release dated 2 June 2026.
But the competition has drawn online backlash, and a number of artists have withdrawn their involvement, The Art Newspaper reported on 18 August 2026. The reasons lie in how the contest is run, who profits from it, and where the money actually goes.
The People's Artist is the latest in a string of online voting competitions operated by Colossal Management, a company founded in Arizona in 2022, though its business model stretches back to 2015. Chief executive Mary Hagen began that year helping run a 'Miss Jetset' cover-model contest at Jetset magazine. By 2017, Hagen was involved in a 'Favorite Chef' competition, and Jetset's founder Darrin Austin created a company called Crow Vote to run these contests. By 2021, the roster had expanded to include 'America's Favorite Pet', 'The Greatest Baker', and 'Mr & Ms Health & Fitness'.
The format is consistent across all of them. Each campaign features a celebrity spokesperson, a cash prize, and a magazine or promotional feature. Contestants compete through public votes across multiple rounds that narrow tens or hundreds of thousands of entrants down to fewer than 20 finalists. Supporters can cast one free vote per day by logging in with Facebook, or buy additional votes at $1 each. Votes reset to zero at the start of each new round.
A percentage of proceeds goes to charities such as the James Beard Foundation, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, and the Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation. But Colossal, registered as a professional fundraiser when it was created in 2022, is entitled to a cut of those donations for organising and running the campaigns. And the money does not flow directly to the big-name charities. Colossal works with two smaller non-profits — Pennsylvania-based DTCare, established in 2019 by Marco Gruelle, and Arizona-based Action Initiative Team — which collect the competition proceeds and distribute lump-sum grants to the larger organisations rather than giving to them directly.
The model has faced legal scrutiny before. In 2021, a class action lawsuit filed in a California district court by family members of a 'Favorite Chef' contestant alleged the contest amounted to an illegal lottery. The judge dismissed the case.
For The People's Artist specifically, the competition reported raising $6,892,628 in 2026 for The Art of Elysium, according to an Instagram post dated 19 June 2026, which also showed a Top 10 voting round was then underway. An earlier post from 6 May 2026 cited a figure of over $6.8 million. Whether the backlash will affect future editions has not been addressed by Colossal publicly.
What makes this stand out is the gap between the art-world sheen — the Artforum feature, the Depp video, the Elysium charity — and the mechanics underneath: paid votes, a for-profit fundraiser taking its cut, and small intermediary non-profits standing between contestants' money and the named charities. For artists who entered in good faith, the structure may not have been what they expected.
