Andreas Broeckmann on Fri, 2 Mar 2001 14:09:17 +0200 |
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Re: FW: Syndicate: DEMAND FOR NEW SELECTION OF VIDEONALE 9 |
dear darko and others, i can see some curators with itching fingers resisting the kind of response that i am going to give to justified yet difficult claims. the problem is, as you point out, the large number of submissions for festivals and competitions and, related to that, the limited time that juries have to evaluate them. sure, it would be ideal to have a jury that can sit for a month and watch all the tapes, explore all interactive projects and, even better, travel to see installations and performances. in this way you would still get partial, yet fairly informed jury judgements. it would also cost a fortune and explode most festival budgets. alternative 1 is not to have open calls but curated programmes which completely rely on what the curators see, like, or find interesting enough. very often, this system creates good, consistent programmes, yet it also tends to create forms of nepotism and often a lack of surprises (which you do not necessarily circumvent by open submissions). financially, it is manageable because you save money on a jury and on sending back tapes. alternative 2 is to restrict the submission of works (thematically, per genre, technically, age/sex/nationality of the artist, ...); however you do this, artists will complain that they have interesting new work which does not fit the categories, a fact that curators are aware of and often also not happy about. but what do you do with 1500 entries when you have an audience that expects quality evaluations? they do not want to see 600 tapes, but 30, maybe 60. they also cannot look at 500 websites, they want to see 10, maybe 20 particularly good ones. and the artists in the festival also want the appropriate attention - we can all imagine what it is like when you are in a 'democratic' show with 1499 other artists ... so, what to do? i think that curators will continue to make their choices, and artists should also make their choices about where and what to submit. many submissions are done in a careless manner, and often juries think, 'why is this artist wasting our time like this? does s/he have no standards to see how bad the work is?' at other times, they may or may not miss important work for one reason or another [btw, Duchamp ... the impressionists were refused to participate in the academy exhibition in paris and created the 'salon des refusees'; there are probably many many duchamps we don't know about] - there is no way ultimately to prevent this from happening, though i think that juries and festivals must make an effort to properly view and evaluate the work; multiplying technical standards and non-standard applications don't make things easier, and artists must make sure that it is actually possible within a reasonable amount of time to understand what is necessary to look at a certain project. i'm sure that many curators will be happy about realistic suggestions for how to deal with the problems of quality and quantity; greetings, -a ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress