A lot of things about the explosion of debate around Vantage Art Projects’ Gatekeepers call continue to bother me. The tone of the discussion often ignored its own rationality in favour of kneejerk name-calling, and the lessons learned seem to be selective. Case in point: Vantage did show concern enough to revise the terms of their call, but have yet to acknowledge the fact that their curator, Angela Grossmann, has publicly resigned from the project.

This latest oversight appears the most dire to date - I cringe to think of artists outside this narrow slice of the blogosphere who will see no evidence of a project breakdown on Vantage’s site - but I still think a core lesson has been drowned out in the chatter, such that I’m willing to risk prolonging the issue by elaborating here.

Also, it’s Wednesday, so this airing of grievances is becoming traditional now.

While Diana Poulsen cited upwards of eighteen points of contention with the Gatekeepers call, none rankled me more than the $45 submission fee. This unusually high sum was to be paid up front as a condition of even viewing the submissions criteria (that assholery has since been fixed, but is moot given, you know, the resignation of the curator) with no clear justification for the expense.

Excepting grad schools (and that’s a completely different kettle of fish), the highest submission or “processing” fee I’ve deigned to pay was $31 for a residency at the Banff Centre. In this case, the opportunity on offer was, not unlike grad school, the sort of prolonged learning experience worth the expense of applying (not to mention the reams of paperwork in quintuplicate). Even rejection didn’t particularly embitter me to the cost, as I was informed that this payment would be held in kind for any of their plentiful residency programs for the following year. By waiving their claim to further fees for the next twelve months, I came away assured that I wasn’t just another pocket to be picked.

So it’s not that I’m dead set against artists paying fees for consideration, but I do think artists need to be smart about their choices, and recent art graduates in particular need to learn to resist the desperate impulses that make them the primary target of exploitive submissions policies.

Flash Forward 2009, DC FotoWeek (Source: www.magentafoundation.org)

I think a good illustration of this point is a comparison between the Gatekeepers project and the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward as pointed out by photographer Matt Sparling on Diana’s blog. Both are juried art publishing ventures that require comparable submission fees as a condition of entry, and appear similar on the surface. But it doesn’t take much digging to see the differences between the two competitions. Candidates applying to Flash Forward are reviewed by a jury of art professionals from Canada, the US and the UK and selected artists (including at least one prize-winner) are included not only in the hard-bound publication but in exhibitions concurrent with book launches in both Canada and the US (most often Toronto and New York, though past shows have also been held in Boston, Montreal and Washington D.C.). In theory, this amounts to exposure to an international panel of curators and critics at the jurying stage, the prospect of multiple public showings of one’s work in two countries with networking opportunities at the openings, and an even slimmer but enticing chance of winning the big prize. Oh, and publication in the big, shiny book.

Applicants to Vantage Art Projects are juried by a single practicing artist (i.e. someone less likely than a curator or critic to have a professional interest in remembering your work), and if selected are included in a publication that, based on the release for Vantage’s first exhibition-in-print, opens with a survey of the selecting artist’s own practice before getting around to contextualizing your chosen work.

In terms of straight-up cost benefit analysis, the potential returns from Flash Forward clearly outweigh the limited exposure an artist hopes to gain from a Vantage publication wherein a strictly Canadian public can only view their work by purchasing the book at the charming price of $69.98 (as opposed to $40.00 for Flash Forward 2009). With this prohibitive level of public access, the odds of furthering one’s career through this venture are slim to non-existent.

If Flash Forward’s fee is a fair standard (and at $50, I’m not even sure that it is), then a project like Vantage has a ways to go to meet that level of return for investment. Awareness of the prevalent standards is essential to making choices from available calls for submissions - and paying for consideration is always a choice, not something to be taken as given.

For further, wiser reading, Joanne Mattera elaborates on the issues surrounding juried shows in one of her wonderful Marketing Monday posts with reference to Jackie Battenfield’s The Artist’s Guide (an indispensable artist resource if ever there was one). Though pay-for-play options are less than ideal, there may be times when the opportunity is worth the price of admission, and both Mattera and Battenfield are adept at pointing out how best to identify those exceptions to what should be a rule of not gouging fees out of artists just because it’s easy.

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