Open Submission Art Exhibits in London and Houston

Robert Boyd

When the Salon exhibits began in France, the only artists who could enter them were members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. No amateurs need apply. The rules were loosened up over time, but the juries were notoriously conservative. Because of the complaints of many artists, in 1863, French emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte established a second salon, the Salon des Refusés, which anyone who couldn't get into the official Salon could enter. That first Salon des Refusés featured Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet.


Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet, 1863

In 1768, England decided it needed it's own official art body and established the Royal Academy. It started an annual exhibit in 1769 that has run continuously until today. And unlike its French counterpart, it is open for every artist to enter. The Times Literary Supplement's podcast, Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon, had a very interesting segment on the latest exhibit, which just opened. The exhibit is displayed salon style in a series of rooms. Each room is "presented" by an invited artist and tend to be somewhat thematic. Each work goes through three layers of judging--one to get selected for the exhibit, one to be hung (work can be "selected but not hung," which doesn't sound any better than being not selected at all), and where in the room you are hung (near the ceiling, for instance, is not as desirable as eye-level.)

Each year they have a different coordinator, so that changes the flavor of the show each year. The show is commercial--most of the works are for sale and the big catalog lists the price. Half the money goes to the artist and half to the Royal Academy schools. This is a big fundraiser for them, and apparently for many attendees, the one time each year that they may buy a piece of art (which can be as cheap as £90 to hundreds of thousands of pounds for big name blue chip artists). You could amazingly get a Cornelia Parker for £330 (it appears to have sold already). Many of the cheaper pieces looked absolutely great--I know I'd be buying if I were there.


Cornelia Parker, Stolen Thunder (Once Removed), Digital print on hahnemühle photo rag 300gsm paper

They get about 12,000 entries and there is a submission fee of £25, so before they sell a single piece, they've made £300,000 in revenue. The process of judging that many works, even if you have a committee involved, must be intensely grueling. It used to be that artists brought in their work to be judged, but now it is done electronically.

I don't know if there are any other open call exhibits with this kind of lineage in the world. But according to the TLS reporter, the Royal Academy Summer Show is very popular, and it is my experience that similar shows elsewhere are popular, too.  The first time I entered one was in the early 90s in Seattle. I had an idea for a cube-shaped painting on wood that would have a grid of nails protruding in all six directions. I was influenced by nail-fetishes, but thought it would be interesting if the nails face out instead of in. I made this very dangerous object and then heard about an open call exhibit in town. This was before the widespread use of jpegs, so works had to be submitted in person. There was a huge line of artists to get into the display space, including me gingerly holding my piece. (I didn't make the cut. Ironically, my friend Jim Blanchard later asked if he could have it, hung it over his breakfast table, whence it fell and punctured the palm of a friend of his.)

This is all a lead-in to discuss Lawndale's Big Show, which opens July 7. This is a juried exhibit that has been held almost every year since 1984. The rules state that "The Big Show is an annual juried exhibition showcasing new work in all media by artists living within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale Art Center." If you draw a 100-mile circle around Houston, it encompasses a huge area--Lufkin, Victoria and Orange all fall well within the circle, which extends into Louisiana to the east and almost to Austin in the west. Of course, driving to those places is further than 100 miles, but as the crow flies, they all fall within the radius. Consequently, every year Lawndale gets some work from the extreme hinterlands. This pays off in spades sometimes--like in 2013 when Port Arthur teenager Avril Falgout made Black Veil Brides and won a best-in-show award.


Avril Falgout, Black Veil Brides, 2013, paper maché, 75 x 50 x 105 inches

The jurors have been pretty great over the years. Among them have been Walter Hopps (1985), Luis Jimenez (1987), Paul Schimmel (1995), Lane Relyea (1999), Michael Ray Charles (2004), and Duncan MacKenzie (2103), who was the one who awarded Falgout the 2013 award.

For the past few years, the juror has always been from out of town. The last Houston juror they had was Don Bacigalupi in 1997, who was the director of the Blaffer Gallery at the time. One reason to use out-of-towners is to get fresh eyes on the art--to have jurors who are completely unbiased, who won't feel any social pressure to pick art by their friends and acquaintances.

But this year, that has changed. The juror is Toby Kamps, a curator at the Menil and soon to be director of the Blaffer Gallery. He has long been an active participant on the Houston art scene, including his curation of No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston in 2009 at the CAMH. He sent out an email to many in Houston's local art community (including me) announcing that he would be the juror. My first thought was that the impartiality of the previous years would be out the window. Kamps knows a lot of local artists, and even if the judging is name-blind, he can tell the style and approach of artists he likes by sight.

I expressed this worry in the Facebook thread, and several artists (as well as Kamps himself) responded. One suggestion was that many of Houston's finest artists don't often apply to the Big Show. Why? I don't know exactly. It used to be that you had to physically bring the art to Lawndale, and that's a pain in the ass (especially if your art is big). But now it's electronic. Part of it is that you get rejected a lot, which sucks and seems especially like an unnecessary insult if you already have venues for your work. And I think another factor is that the Big Show has come to have a reputation for amateur work (in the best sense of the word) and showcasing emerging artists, which for an older, more established artist, may make the Big Show seem less attractive. In the Facebook thread, Kamps seemed to be specifically working against that. He sent out his Facebook post to a large selection of Houston's best-known artists. He seemed to want the Big Show to be a showcase for the best of Houston, like the old Blaffer Area Exhibits, which the Blaffer put on until 2008.

One artist contacted me expressing a worry that this change might make the Big Show seem less welcoming for emerging artists. The Big Show has been important in years past for giving emerging artists the boost they needed.

But Kamps addressed that concern. He wrote in the Facebook thread, "I want the Big Show to be really big. There'll be room for older, established artists, rising stars, and lots of new talent. I want EVERYONE to apply, whether I know them or not."

Other rule changes this year have been that artists can only submit one work (in the past, you could submit multiple works, which sometimes meant one might have several works in one show--such as the little suites of work by Matt Messinger and John Sturtevant in the 2011 Big Show). Director of Lawndale Stephanie Mitchell told me that she wanted to "challenge artists to hone in on one work made in the last year."

To encourage amateurs and emerging artists, Lawndale has reached out to schools for entries. And unlike the Royal Academy, there is no admission fee, so that is one obstacle that formerly existed removed.

Mitchell added, "Toby's line of thinking--which I very much agree with and I think is very much in the spirit of Lawndale--is that by showing a wide, diverse range of artists working across different media and at different stages of their career, everyone is elevated."

I wonder if in future Big Shows, they could sell the work as the Royal Academy does. Or would that be a bridge too far?

Report from Austin part 2: A Buncha Art Critics, Sittin' Around Talkin'

The reason I was invited up to Austin for the Hybrid Arts Summit was to represent bloggers in one of a series of critical roundtables. There were three in all. The first one featured Wendy Vogel, Core Fellow and editor of ..might be good, and Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin, arts critic and reporter for the Austin-American Statesman. They spoke a great deal about the mechanics of their respective gigs--circulation, who reads their work, how assignments work, the business of the publications, etc. I was astonished to learn that ...might be good had 8000 subscribers. Subscribing is free, admittedly, but the subject matter of the web magazine is fairly narrow--mostly contemporary art in Texas or somehow related to Texas. Of those 8000 subscribers, only 16% of them are from Texas. One can only speculate who the non-Texan readers are and why they subscribe. Perhaps it says something about the uncentered nature of the art world that interested parties feel they have to subscribe to a critical web magazine from Texas.

This is a subject that I find interesting--who reads criticism (and art news) and why? To me, this is one of the defining issues for a publication. It should be a key part of one's publishing mission--to fulfill the needs of those readers. Van Ryzin described the mission of the Statesman as to provide information to its readers. And no doubt its readers depend on it for information. But readers keep coming back to it because they are interested in what it has to say. Providing information is a part of, but not the entirety of, retaining reader interest. (This is why good writing--writing with real style--counts. If it was all about information, writing-qua-writing would be irrelevant.)

I was curious about whether Vogel and Van Ryzin felt a need to sell their publications. Van Ryzin spoke about a wall separating the editorial from the advertising departments, and said she never thought about "selling" the paper. She said that the editors told them that "Good news sells papers." (By this, I took her meaning to be high-quality news.) It's a nice, idealistic point of view, and true to an extent, no doubt. But if that's the whole of your editorial ideology, I think you're abdicating your responsibility to keep your readers interested. There is something beyond "high quality news" that brings people in. I'm not accusing Van Ryzin of being boring, but she did express repeatedly that the Statesman was about providing information to readers. As a mission, I find that kind of barren and puritanical. I just read an interview with Harold Bloom in which he said:

I don’t see any point to literary criticism or literary editing unless it’s as personal as poetry, or some varieties of the novel, the story or drama. Literary criticism is either part of literature or shouldn’t exist. I teach, think, read and write personally. What else could I be? What are we all here for? Objectivity is a farce. It’s a myth. It’s shallow. Deep subjectivity is not easy—it’s very difficult—it’s what you try to educate people into. ("The Anatomy of Influence," Boston Review, 4/28/2011)

Substitute "art" for "literary," and you have my feeling about art criticism and art writing in general. It's not merely information we're providing. Indeed, a good critic has style, and you feel you know her when you've read a number of her pieces. A good critic is not, therefore, a slave to Strunk & White, the A.P. Stylebook, or the MLA Handbook. Nor does a good critic stand aloof, with Olympian disinterest--instead, she is passionately involved in the work under question.

But that still leaves aside the question of audience. While Samuel Johnson's famous line "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" is proven true every time I put up a new post (for which I get paid nothing), I nonetheless think hard about my readership. I have the least possible reason to pander and am beholden to no one. And yet, my thoughts return again and again to the readers. I do this--write this blog--for me but also for them. My ego wants to keep them involved. That is the strongest motivating force I have, and that's why I write. But I also recognize in myself a desire to nurture the art world. Wendy Vogel addressed that:

If [...might be good] writing about a show gets more people in the door...I think that that's a success. If somebody writing about a show at ...might be good helps the artists sell more, whether I like the work or not, I that's a success because I think one thing criticism should do is help stimulate an entire art world and art economy.

I sort of agree with this, but not totally. Sometimes, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, our job as critics is to stand athwart some artist's career and yell "Stop!" Vogel's idea of criticism (and, if I may expand it, art writing generally) stimulating the art economy can lead to a dangerous practice: cheerleading. This came up a bit in the first talk. (I commented that only writing good reviews was like being a sportswriter and only reporting when the home team won.) But it was a far bigger issue in the second panel, which featured photographer Barry Stone, Chris Cowden of Women and Their Work gallery, and Charissa Terranova.


 Lakes Were River #1, a publication of the photographer's collective Lakes Were Rivers

This was a very different group. Except for Terranova, none of them were critics per se. Stone runs a semi-informal crit group--photographers critiquing other photographer's work. (He is also the founder of the photographers' collective Lakes Were Rivers. I don't know what relationship Lakes Were Rivers has with the crit group, though.) Cowden publishes handsome trifold catalogs for her exhibits and hires freelance art writers to write essays for them. Only Terranova, a professor at U.T. Dallas, is also an art writer. Her position as a critic is ideal--as a professor, she doesn't need to hustle writing jobs and can afford to burn bridges if necessary. Indeed, she stopped writing for a daily paper when they edited her work too heavily (she said the straw that broke the camel's back was when they asked her to remove the word "trope," because it might be too jargony or difficult for their readers). But she said she never writes bad reviews. Her reason? She just doesn't like doing it.


catalog for Hana Hillerova: Super Space from Women & Their Work, with an essay by Charrissa Terranova

I mentioned this (in disbelief) to a friend of mine, and she came back not exactly agreeing with Terranova, but saying that for many people, writing negative reviews or harsh criticism within a local community could be politically difficult. That got my back up a bit, so here's my response:

There are lots of reasons for "cheerleading":
1) A critic might feel he or she is representing art in the face of a hostile or at best indifferent public, therefore would want to give art--especially contemporary art, which is often hard for the uninitiated-but-curious public to understand--as much of a boost as possible
2) Desire not to burn bridges. Critics (especially local critics) live in work among the persons and institutions they write about. These critics will need to continue their relationships with artists/institutions into the future for the purpose of their work. So if instead of a bad review, a critic writes no review, important relationships are preserved without any sacrifice of integrity on the part of the critic.
3) Desire not write about art one doesn't like. Writing a bad review or a highly critical editorial or think-piece might not be much fun. I know a lot of writers who just don't like to do it. Why do something you hate doing?
4) Desire not to hurt people's feelings. I don't like hurting people's feelings, and excluding bullies and sadists, I think most people don't like it. Not writing bad reviews, negative editorials, etc., is one way not to hurt people's feelings.

All of these are legit. I personally have wrestled with each one. But I think cheerleading lowers the quality of publications (whether that publication is a newspaper, a magazine, a web-magazine or a blog). Readers like a certain amount of drama. In art writing, drama comes in the form of good reviews followed by bad reviews, as well as by scandals, fiery manifestos, gossipy punditry, bitter denunciations, unabashed love letters, snarky put-downs, heartfelt celebrations, etc. In short, the full range of human response. There's a reason people like sports pages. Wide World of Sports famous cliche line--"The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat"--is well-remembered because it's so true.  The problem with the cheerleading mode is that you end up with a bland publication that has one flavor, one tone, which is celebratory. You only get the "thrill of victory," and that gets boring after a while for readers. So for me, I think cheerleading is a grave disservice to readers, who want to be entertained by what they are reading (even if they are reading something dry and difficult like October).

My other problem is for the critic, never writing a bad review means--possibly--that one's critical facilities will atrophy (not to mention one's writing abilities). One ends up like the gym rat who only exercises his upper-body muscles. He might have great abs and delts and whatnot, but they rest on two chicken-leg pillars. I think it's important for critics to exercise all of their critical and writerly facilities.

I would add a third problem with a "no negative criticism" policy, which is in a way weaker than the other two. Artists (and curators and gallerists) need to be held to account. Their friends are all going to tell them they're great--they need someone to say "You suck!" if they suck. And they need to be discouraged from doing the things that suck.

But what about reason two--desire not to burn bridges? For me, if someone criticizes what I do, an shrug it off as well as I can. But I'm not an artist or curator who depends on a certain amount of good will for my professional survival. I have rarely gotten really negative feedback, but it occasionally happens. And I would expect critics who are more aggressive than me get it even more--either to their faces or behind their backs. Maybe you have to be a gruff character like Donald Judd to write bad review after bad review and remain a force in the art world. Locally, Michael Bise seems to be a fearlessly honest critic, despite his connection with the local scene as an artist. I think the benefits for a regional art scene of having fearlessly honest critics outweighs the negatives for the critics. At least I hope so. If not, then there need to be more critics who, like me, have nothing to lose.

The final panel was the one I was on. I think the idea was to give new media people a say. We had Duncan MacKenzie from Bad at Sports and Richard Serrano from Art This Week. (I should also mention that Salvador Castillo moderated all of these panels.) I was the odd man out--these guys were producing respectively podcasts and videos. I was the only one who wrote stuff. (This is not totally fair--Bad At Sports, which is a veritable empire, has a blog portion.) Mackenzie had a very specific notion of his intended audience--other artists, working in their studios. Bad at Sports was something they could listen to while they worked. That makes perfect sense and explains away one obvious weakness of any art podcast--the lack of images. In this respect, both Pan and Art This Week are superior to Bad at Sports--we can show in addition to telling. But one problem I personally have with video is that it demands you pay attention to it right now. Writing you can always walk away from and return to later. But this is a minor objection--a good short video interview or walk-through can be really entertaining and enlightening. Art This Week is a fairly young endeavor, but one could see it growing into real importance in Texas. Serrano also expressed an interest into expanding into art-education videos, which strikes me as a great way to make a little money doing something you love.

But the thing about both these enterprises is that they are not criticism. And maybe that's the future. We think of writing about art (or video or interviews or whatever) as being criticism; that the phrases "art criticism" and "art writing" are synonyms. I think this old way of thinking is collapsing. As Nancy Princenthal wrote:

On one hand, there is no self-evident reason to make the linkages between art and theory that have been argued over the past twenty years, productive and often fascinating though they have been. Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name a few heuristic precedents). ["Art Criticism, Bound to Fail," Art In America, 2006]

But I would go even further. I don't think art criticism is inherently the best way to talk about art. Or rather, I don't think it should be privileged over other kinds of writing about art. I think, for example, writing about the economics of auctions by Noah Horowitz or Don Thompson will tell us as much about the art of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons as any criticism will. Art writing (and video, etc.) needs to embrace all approaches.

I think the Hybrid Arts Summit barely scratched the surface. I would like to see more events or get-togethers like this. I don't know if the art world cares too much about this stuff--I personally feel pretty irrelevant to the goings on in the local art scene. But for me, thinking about these issues, and discussing them with colleagues,  is useful.