Juries, Prizes and Merit...

Seeing as how I derive part of my living from things I make with my hands and then finish and present for sale, I find myself being both rather generous with my openness towards different kinds of things, while at the same time also being a somewhat harsh critic of what my ostensible peers are doing.

My somewhat critical and judgmental nature came out this past weekend at the Holiday show we attended, in the context of looking at some of the things that were offered for sale and thinking to myself "it's all well and good that you enjoy doing what you're doing, but you could really do a little bit more to present your endeavors to the general public in a way that's more than just a complete jumble."

It's not even that the quality of these items offered was so bad, it was more a case of fully adult people in their 40s (and beyond) sitting there presenting their wares at a Christmas bazaar in a style I would consider parallel to a 7-year old showing up in a supermarket parking lot with a box and a scribbled sign that says "kittens free to a good home."

I'm not sure why this is annoying me as much as it is except maybe for the fact that allegedly "juried" events often turn out to be not nearly as juried as you'd like to think. In fact, you look at some of the offerings and you can't help but think that there's a heavy dose of nepotism at work!

Of course this is where I may be too harsh of a critic, and perhaps a little naive in the sense that I think that any system can work based on anything other than favoritism and nepotism.

Regardless, my mind sort of slides sideways into school systems and the whole concept of participation prizes for anybody who simply shows up.

I remember when I lived back in Texas in the 1990s, there was this one particular middle school that handed out bumper stickers, and it seemed like virtually half the cars in town had a "Student of the month" at that middle school. From where I'm sitting, if everybody gets a prize, the entire value of being given a prize is kind of decimated to the point of being meaningless.

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with Mrs. Denmarkguy a long time ago about the overuse of words like "awesome" and "excellence." In context, if you go around saying that everything is awesome, and that it's excellent, that actually suggests (at least to me) that "awesome" and "excellent" are pretty average and thus calling something "excellent" is actually relatively meaningless.

Of course, much of the world doesn't see it that way, and I have often been taken to task for not being a little more compassionate. Maybe I should be...

All in all, I'm pretty content with life and the way it works, so this is not a case of me singing "sour grapes" because I didn't win some prize in high school for doing something that should have won a prize that somebody else got instead, primarily in service of making sure everyone got to have a prize. Far from it! I just think it's a little weird.

Of course I'm a fine one to say anything along these lines in this interesting community of ours here where the "on paper assumption" would be that we live in some kind of meritocracy, but do we really?

Of course, it's hard to point fingers because we live in an entire world where the idea of a meritocracy tends to get shot down almost immediately, so why would Hive be any different?

Anyway, some things don't impress me... including "juried" art shows where it is quite clear that merit and quality had little to do with someone's presence in the lineup!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!

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Created at 2024.12.09 00:26 PST
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