I recently submitted work to a juried exhibit. None of my photos were accepted; in itself, while frustrating, is just a fact of life. What I've found very interesting is the seeming total arbitrariness of curatorial standards - many juried shows I've submitted to seemed to either have no standards or applied them in a haphazard manner. In the case of this most recent show, the exhibit was titled "The Human Form". Since I do male nudes, I submitted three (the maximum number of entries allowed). On returning to the gallery to retrieve my work, I perused the exhibit as it was hung on the wall. For a show about The Human Form, there was only ONE male semi-nude, the rest of the nudes were female. The three prize-winning pieces for the show did not even feature a discernible human form - two were swirly abstract painting-thingies, and the third one was a suitcase with tylenol pills and small torn up newspaper bits, some of which had photos of faces on them, decoupaged onto the outside in the general pattern of an American flag.
I have two questions, then. A: What is going on here - am I missing something, or do I just live in a sufficiently artistically devoid city (Washington DC) that this kind of crap passes for acceptable curatorial behavior?
and
B: What is this extreme bias against male nudes in art? For a show about The Human Form, I found it puzzling at best to see that half of humanity was for all intents and purposes excluded from the show.
I have two questions, then. A: What is going on here - am I missing something, or do I just live in a sufficiently artistically devoid city (Washington DC) that this kind of crap passes for acceptable curatorial behavior?
and
B: What is this extreme bias against male nudes in art? For a show about The Human Form, I found it puzzling at best to see that half of humanity was for all intents and purposes excluded from the show.