RHA Submissions go digital

coconnell44

For those of you who enter the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition- what do you make of the change in submission methods? Personally the phrase 'when it ain't broken, don't fix it' comes to mind. Most exhibitions use a digital selection process nowadays and the RHA was one of the only ones where you knew the original piece, as you intended it to be seen, would be looked at by the judging panel. I really dislike photographs when it comes to judging pieces of art, no matter how professionally taken they rarely do justice to a piece that an artist has spent hours creating. Also you'd think that after the recent RTE documentary they'd have kept it the same. I just cant imagine the same level of attention being given to photos on a screen that would be given to physical artworks. Colours in a painting can never be exactly replicated on a computer screen, as an artist I know this all too well. Bad move and cutting corners IMO.
Of course the entry fee still remains the same.

The days of the good 'ol RHA letter in April seem to be gone. I'd rather be rejected by a nice letter than a cold old email

Jackandjones

It doesn’t matter what selection method is used an RHA member told me. First members work is selected, four or five paintings each, then teachers, then priority students and whatever is left of the submissions gets thrown up, but everyone pays the piper... pay and play the game, enter small paintings as you cannot upstage members, a disgraceful selection process with or without wifi, some member even had their sisters work in it last year I heard. That’s called nepotism. Everyone knows this and if they don’t they are plain ordinary braindead. With Ireland lagging behind hugely in the history of modern day painting this is crazy carry on ..hairbrain. First of all, teachers should be teaching, not putting up substandard exhibitions at post graduate level all over the flippin’ country, bringing their little students along on leads. And the students should go out and get life lessons for a minimum of five years after college, rather then packs of them painting forests and flowers, or this blob of dated modernism and monochrome interior design that went completely underdeveloped, and truck loads of cheap concepts that are not organically grown, that have already been done. Enough is enough. Irish curators and historians need to stand up straight. They are going in the wrong direction with art history and it’s become very clear. A lot of the curators in Ireland are only working at the capacity of post graduate level and many curators in Ireland ignore emails and don’t even get back to professional artists, which means they have no honour and should not be working in the arts. Every curator needs to check themselves if they are practicing dark arts within the arts and stop lying to themselves. It’s called mindfulness. The rest of Europe and America is on fire, ten Years ahead visibly, and they are creating a wonderful history of art, that’s magical, thats beautiful, that’s fresh and new.