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2008 Montauk Art Festival ZAPP Monitor Jury
Comments from a Gallery Owner |
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| The Booth |
| I was deducting a point off the total score
for a bad booth. My family has been in this business for years, and after I
finished, they told me that the norm for a bad booth is between 20 to 40%
of the total score. It struck me, when I looked at these images, that the
work was there but the emphasis was just not on presentation. I was
really shocked to realize that a good product can have such a crappy
presentation and probably still sell. And the upshot of it is that you
really don’t want these people to show up at a really good show with a
flea market looking booth. It’s one of those things that make a show look
really good. |
| I’ve won awards
for my booth for the past 25 years. I had someone contact me just last
week that wanted to use a picture of my booth in a newsletter as an
example of what a booth should look like. I know it’s taken a lot of
energy for us to put together a really good booth with sound and good
lighting. |
| Another alarming thing was that there were actually
digital time signatures on some of these booth images, bad lighting, other
booths in the background, and people in the photograph. All of this was
shocking especially given that a lot of these people were supposed to be
real pros. It was interesting to see that the artists seemed to think that
presentation was not important if the art was good. In other words, “my
art is so good I can hang it on anything and it’ll look beautiful”, but it
didn’t translate that way. |
| Looking at the Images and Suggestions on Improving the
System |
| With monitor jurying we could only see one enlarged image
at a time. It was a little disconcerting because you always tend to favor
things that show continuity from one image to another showing one style of
work. And I also saw images where I thought that these people were
borrowing slides from other people because it couldn’t be coming from the
same mind. |
| Another thing about the way we were jurying is that there
is no zoom function. I wanted to see some of the solder joints on the
jewelry. I saw several paintings that I couldn’t tell if they were
executed well. The composition may have been a little strange and I
thought that if I could zoom in, maybe I could give them a different score
if I knew how well it was executed. But I couldn’t come in close enough to
see the details in some of these paintings. I saw rings that might have
had flashing (left over metal from the casting) left there. But I needed
to look at it close up because it’s nearly an unforgivable sin in terms of
jewelry to not getting off all the sharp edges from the casting. At one point I saw something in mixed media but the statement
didn’t describe what the technique was. I would have liked to zoom in to
see more of how the piece was done. Several times I ran into a situation
where I could have given a more accurate score. |
| I had to scroll down to see the bottoms of the images and
it took me a long time to realize that there was a description of the work
underneath even further down on the page. ZAPP should use the space at the
top for the description. I hate the artist statement because you can’t
describe an intricate technique in 100 characters. Some
people were so minimal in their description that it practically did no
good. |
| Listing Awards |
| I noticed that for most ZAPP shows, there is
no way to list your credits and awards, though this show let you. I prefer
to see them because in general, you learn a lot about a person from the
company he keeps. I think that if you get into the Disney Master’s it
should mean something because I’ve never seen any crap in that show. It’s
like birds of a feather tend to flock together. I would like to see a list
of shows that the artists have done because it lets the juror know that
they’re in the ballpark. |
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The juror who let me do this
interview prefers to remain anonymous |
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