Dear Bead & Button Show in Milwaukee, I love you to bits. I’ve had several pieces entered in your Bead Dreams competition over the years. I adore seeing the amazing ‘statement’ pieces that your other entrants show off every year. I get so much inspiration from you.
I’ve never been able to attend; my days of being able to afford $1500 convention vacations are long past, I’m afraid, a casualty of the new working class in America.
This year, I can’t even enter, thanks to your $50 entry fee, ostensibly chosen to offset shipping and insurance. Really? I ship stuff all over the place, and I can do it for less than $50. Most shows that I’ve seen make their artists do that, anyway.
Here’s why I think raising the entry fee for those reasons is bogus: it’s applied at the front end of the entry process. If we paid a more modest fee to enter and were juried into the show, most of us so honored would be happy to pay our own return shipping and insurance costs. It’s fairly easy to calculate. Ah, but if *all entrants* pay that $50 per-item fee, the funds accrue whether artists are juried in or not. I’ve heard that high entry fees are often driven by the venue (bad hotel, greedy hotel, we’d already be staying there, try not to gouge us more!). I’ve also heard that high entry fees are a better guarantor of quality entrants. Nope – that’s what your jurors are there to assess. Let’s not forget the other battlecry of the fee-happy venue: ‘It’s a tax writeoff!’ Duh, sure – next year.
Even major regional art festivals tend to charge less than you do, just for entry into the jurying.
I can’t even ask you directly, Bead & Button Show, because your website feedback form is wonky. So I’ll remain on your mailing list and daydream over convention notes, and hope I win a lottery someday.
Because I probably can’t enter this piece this year, the only time it will still qualify.
I’m a sad puppy. All my avocations have been overtaken by people richer in time and funds: artwork, costuming, jewelry, writing. A lot of shows and workshops I’d love to enter are raising their entry fees, or levying fees for the first time. Air travel and hotel costs are more exorbitant than ever. So is the cost of finishing out one art degree, and adding another. Artists like myself – who do not teach and thus earn class fees, and don’t make a lot from gallery sales – are shunted to the sidelines more and more.
I’ll still do what I love, because I can’t not do it. But I can buy a lot of beads and fabric for $1500 or even $50. The show-stopping book arts projects I could complete and reserve for exhibition entries I instead send off to my art reps, for as-fast-as-possible sales. There is no point, in my area, in making jewelry pieces like the Rain Gloves (above) for gallery sales, because my ROI would be so low.
It’s reality – I can play with y’all, or I can earn money in commercial freelancing, and keep art as a hobby.