On Jan 13, 2009, at 1:57 PM, [email protected] wrote:
good question. No one usually. It is the responsibility of the
committee
running the show to find the jurors and they usually ask around
their artistic
friends. Very rarely do they come up with good solid people to jury
a show.
More than that:
Any one show that includes more than two artists cannot do more than
show one or at most two works from a range of as many as twenty or
thirty or so individuals. Such a show is all range and no depth. Each
work it, usually, the only exemplar of a given artist's work, and thus
it stands in for all the others by the same artist. Often, in large
shows, the sponsors or juror selects a range from specific categories,
either large formal categories like photography, sculpture, and
painting, or stylistic categories like abstraction, landscapes,
figures, still lifes, etc. And then there's the most narrow category
of all, the juror himself or herself, with all his/her preferences,
prejudices, insensitivities, agendas, etc.
My experience over the years, from art school on, has been that any
given show selected by any given individual is only a single example
of one person's preferences from among a limited group of works, self-
selected by the artists who submitted slides or works. And the
scuttlebutt often was, "Oh, X is the juror. He hates sculpture." Or "Y
loves nudes and puppies and really has it in for abstract pictures."
No single show can be comprehensive enough.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
