Signs you are at a bad art festival and problems with Zapplication

December 13, 2010

There’s a great quote in one of my favorite movies of all time – the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski – in which The Stranger says, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.”

Well, fellow photographer and artist Christine Hauber and I recently got eaten by the bear at an “art festival” put on by a local Art Center, and the bear is Zapplication (Zapp). For us artists, Zapp is a website through which the vast majority of shows are now relying on to facilitate the jurying of their art festivals. Seems simple for the artists: log into their website, find a show in your area, select your 3 or 4 or 5 digital images of your best artwork and include a booth photo of your typical display, explain you and your artwork in 100 characters or less, pay a jury fee, and wait to hear if you get into the show or not.

No more getting in touch with the shows to have them mail you an application, no more filling out application forms, getting slides made of your artwork, and no more mailing out application forms hoping they arrive before the deadline. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Shows are popping up all over the country lately on Zapp hoping we apply to their shows. It is a great opportunity for the show: they get a nationwide pool of artists already signed up to Zapp from which to draw from, they add some splashy marketing text explaining how their show is the best one to apply for, and they rake in the money in jury fees from hundreds to even thousands of artists hoping to fill 50, 100, 200, maybe 300 available spots.

And every once in a while, the jurying part of the show just completely fails. You give the show a little credit in advance – take for example an area Arts Center putting on the show – so you should be confident that you will be entering a well juried fine art festival, right?

Enter the hungry bear…

Wooden clothes pins to display loose photos?? At a juried fine art festival? Really?!?

As artists applying to fine art festivals, we expect – and the public expects – a tightly juried show where quality is paramount to their festival. Quality of artwork and quality of presentation. While quality of artwork can be subjective, there are pretty common guidelines representing quality of presentation.

Now I am not saying there is a time and a place for such a presentation – but the time and place should not be a juried fine art festival, put on by an Arts Center. In the above photo, this person’s display consisted of photos strung along a clothes line with wooden clothes pins holding them up. And this wasn’t even the only booth with such a display!

I split the blame between Zapp and the festival jurying the show, with the victims ending up being the participating artists as well as the attending patrons. Zapp has become a juggernaut in the art festival application process, making it way too easy for art festivals to collect tons more in application fees for their shows than what was previously possible, and reducing the overall quality of shows.

Not all art festivals are allowing bad work - how do we keep it that way?

One would think this would mean a much better juried art festival, but every once in a while the system simply breaks down. In today’s digital age, it is way too easy to produce great looking jury photos that often don’t even closely represent what an artist actually is displaying. Zapp has made the jurying of artists too random and impersonal.

Getting juried into a show isn’t about a body of work, artist biographies, and experience any more. It’s all just about those 4 or 5 photos that may not even quite represent what the artist truly offers and which certainly doesn’t prove that the artist in fact even created the artwork themselves (of which should be the subject of another blog post).

The "Evil Empire" of art festival jurying?

Zapp has the ability to have the shows request more information about the artist and their artwork in the application process. Shows like the La Jolla Festival of the Arts require more fields to be filled out when applying, asking more about you as an artist. They appear to not just rely on a couple images and 100 characters – they take the time to get more information about the artist to help them jury a higher caliber of artist.

The shows themselves need to take this upon themselves to improve the look of their show and attract the right patrons to the show they are advertising. They need to take the time to read and consider more information about the artists they are considering allowing into their art festivals. In the last few years I have noticed a decline in the quality of artists at shows that have billed themselves as having the best artists around. I have talked to fabulous artists who did not get into these shows that really deserved to be there. And I have heard patrons comment that the quality of certain shows has gone down in the last few years – a direct result of the jurying process.

It really seems from my perspective that the more that shows rely on Zapp’s basic application process, the more these shows suffer from a quality standpoint of accepted artists. This in turn dramatically affects the number and quality of the patrons attending the show. Patrons may expect to see the photographer shown above displaying their work at a craft show or flea market, but certainly not at an art festival. I know of many patrons who have stopped going to certain shows due to the drop in quality of the artists accepted into the show.

Zapp has made it way to easy for shows to find artists, dramatically increasing the amount of applicants to these shows. The increase in applications reduces the odds of getting into a show (the 2010 Cherry Creek show received 2251 applications for just 230 spaces). It increases the amount of money a show brings in in application fees (which typically range from $25 to $50).

But with an increase in applicants comes an increase in the time needed to jury a show. This is probably why most shows do not ask for more information like La Jolla does. Instead these shows jury artists based the 4 or 5 images you have, spending perhaps 10 seconds per artist during a first round screening.

How do we change the system? Does it need changing? Are you happy or upset with the way our artwork is juried for Zapp shows? Do you agree or disagree with my observations? Has the quality of shows gone downhill recently? Feel free to add your comments below.