Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Commission Voting: Finalist

Its curious to me that my proposal page only got 10 page hits from jurors. The jury process includes making these pages which show more depth, work samples, examples, resumes, and so forth. Mine in particular had working prototypes in flash of what was to be built, which were in my opinion quite useful for an understanding of the project. For mine to be juried, in my opinion the page needed to be visited and the prototypes examined. Only 10 people viewed it. Fair or unfair? Not to waste time being sore that I lost - boo hoo everybody get out their violins, but I feel it wasn't really juried. Or maybe my writeup just sucked so much that it enticed very few people to click the proposal page. But a hell of alot of work was put into the proposal page and the prototypes in particular.

This brings up something "funny" that happened last year at a big museum biennial competition I was in. Over 750 applicants with a 'hot guest curator'. Everyone paid their $25 or $40 or whatever it was to be juried by said curator. I happened to know the days that the curator was in town for it. Since my particular entry was a piece of "Internet Art" - this gave me the power to quantitate their process. For the first time in this particular museum's history I think, an entrant had such invisible power. Looking at my logs and running some shell commands (as done here with the rhizome commissions), I could see that it wasn't even juried once.

I really didn't care that much that I lost, but in this case I knew and had proof that the process wasn't all that fair as the entry form had implied. What should I then do with such information? Being curious, I asked around and eventually found out that most entries were 'pre-screened' out before jurying really took place with the big international curator. That part of the process was not advertised, and most people who paid their $40 got screwed. If you add that up, that's over $15,000 - $20,000 that was earned by the museum unfairly. I'm not saying that art should or should not be fair, I just found it interesting that my web server logs exposed the often nasty nature of large art institutions.