I strongly urge everyone to give it a listen, especially anyone involved or interested in the BiW Best of Festival. Amy talks at length about her choices and she elaborates on her experiences judging the competition.

It is a really important footnote to all the conversations we’ve been having here lately, I think it demonstrates what benefit an open voting process can be for everyone concerned, I certainly learned a lot from listening to it.

While you’re at the archives please create a free account at Soundcloud and follow our shows, that way we can keep track of how many people are listening and you get notified of any new shows as soon as they’re added.

Thanks for listening!

The early process of this was the nomination for the top 30, Arahan and I placed quite a few of the works there for people to choose from, so some artists wasn’t aware that their work had even been nominated until they stumbled across it by accident or if they were contacted to be asked what the correct name of the piece was.

An extreme example is that Strawberry Holiday contacted me for the first time yesterday regarding the name of her tree, which is called ‘Bog Tree’ by the way.

I will reiterate what I believe I said on podcast #2, which is that I don’t like the piece in question by Gazira. But it ends there. I don’t have any objections about her as a person nor do I question her artistic merit or involvement or any of those things. If it came across that I was being mean to her personally or anything like that, I completely apologize – that was never my intention. But I have very strong (negative) feelings about that work, and that remains the case.

It was not my intention to take your words out of context, Amy! However, the tone of your blogpost in regards to Gazira was not flattering. It seemed to question her professionalism, which I consider to be impeccable. Mostly I am lamenting the use of this venue and platform (the Internet) for a discussion that could have just as well stayed within the jury. And I do value your opinions very much. More than you know.

A question to you, Jay. Did you stipulate to all participants of the 30 Best that they MUST make themselves available for the Top Five? Did you say this in writing?

“Was her not responding to requests to get back in touch with the competition her way of intentionally snubbing it? Was she out of the loop in a very temporary sort of way and will be back in a day or two? I honestly have no idea. I understand and support Jay’s desire to get this all sorted out as quickly as possible so as to give the replacing artist as much time as possible… but I’m also missing an awful lot of information.”

I don’t know Gazira; I don’t think either ill of her or highly of her – my opinion on her is entirely neutral. My desire was to keep the Top 5 intact from the way it was when it was originally published, but I was trying to make the point that I didn’t have all the information that Jay had, and so perhaps I would have felt differently if I had.

Following are some comments regarding Amy’s blogpost:

I’m a believer in transparency but I’m also of the opinion that too much transparency ends up hurting all concerned parties. This struck me as one of those instances. Jay may be disorganized at times (albeit enthusiastic), but his heart is in the right place and his goals are exciting, and many of us who work with him know this to be true.

As one of the judges, I would have vastly preferred to conduct this conversation via email with the other judges, and we all had each other’s email addresses by the time the final judgements occurred.

I’ve been a judge on a number of competitions in Real Life, and have also coordinated more than a few international competitions (including design) that had to carefully adhere to the law. In every instance, the judges were free to discuss questions or issues with the coordinator and each other, but I cannot recall, ever, the necessity or even the desire to go public on each of the judges’ choices.

I specifically asked Jay not to make my selections public and he respected that. In my work with Not Possible IRL, I already make a “cut” on what I think is worth experiencing and what I don’t, and after that, I’m not interested in prioritizing my selections. For me, it is either “yes,” or “no.” Having said this, I should add that I *agonized* over my choices for the Brooklyn is Watching Festival. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in the past year, in fact. Each selection went through many filters, and none of them were “personal” in nature. To better illustrate, I will share that I was unhappy with one of the participants at the time for reasons unrelated to the festival or their art, but I still included that person on the list.

Every person has their own style and needs and when I agreed to sit on the jury it was with the understanding that the final selection might necessitate a discussion amongst the judges, especially if there was a tie, which there was.

There was an email exchange and I participated as much as anybody. I saw no problem with that aspect of the organization.

Re: Gazira Babelli… A little history first. I was the person who rezzed Gazira’s “Avatar on Canvas” at Brooklyn is Watching back in the early days. In fact, I have rezzed numerous pieces at BiW without even asking their creators. I stopped doing that when the discussion arose (and Jay decided) that it was okay for people to place their own works in very close proximity to other people’s works or even build on the work of others, since I felt that it was not my place to determine if that would be okay on behalf of the artists who’s works I wanted to share. I don’t have time to go chasing permissions down. Nowadays, I simply tell artists about BiW and encourage them to learn more.

I have no idea if Gazira was particularly interested in Brooklyn is Watching, or not. In fact, it could be that she created the “30 Best” installation because she has good manners – which she does – and didn’t want to offend. Or, maybe she was excited about participating, but was not feeling well enough or rested enough to deal with this. In fact, I sent an email to Jay and ALL the judges explaining: “Gazira is in desperate need of some rest, so she may not want to/be able to participate, after all. I know that she’d had this holiday planned for ages and was looking forward to it the way a starving man looks forward to his next meal.”

In her blogpost, Amy said, “Was her not responding to requests to get back in touch with the competition her way of intentionally snubbing it?” Goodness. Gazira is not that kind of person. Even if she is bloody brilliant. This is exactly the kind of conversation I would have vastly preferred to have kept in-house. Now everyone has suffered. BiW has had its laundry aired on the damned indelible Internet and Gazira, one of the kindest, most considerate and professional persons I have ever met, has been made to look bad.

And while I opened this comment saying that Jay can be disorganized, I also want to lavish him with praise for so many things that have gone right. The new KU installation is simply ravishing, and everything that BiW *should* be. I think this whole effort ROCKS!

Arahan, I really appreciated that map. It was invaluable to me. And Patrick’s advice is so sound. What a positive, nurturing group! Go Brooklyn is Watching!

I would like to just correct one thing that Patrick said in the above comment: Not *all* institutions do their budgeting in the way in which he describes. The School of Visual Arts, where I’m a faculty member certainly doesn’t. It’s actually pretty common for them to have a
little discretionary money to throw around at the end of a semester. I suspect the same is true at Parsons, where Jay teaches. I understand
that many schools do it the way that Patrick says, but it’s not a hard and fast rule – and certainly not with art schools in NYC.

Why is this important? Because if nothing else comes of all this, I would really like to make it so that Jay feels comfortable reaching
out and asking for help from people who have more administrative/instutional experience than he might have, and he’s not going to feel that’s the case if he gets his head bitten off whenever he reaches out to someone privately for help. If we’re all agreed that the project needs more clarity and organization, reaching out to seek the advice of others is certainly one way that the project could get
it. I also really fail to see what’s wrong with asking someone for their assistance – it’s totally ok if the answer is no, but what’s so
wrong with the question?

“I did need, for the sake of the show being as good as it could be, to have five artists who _DID care_, who wanted to be there and wanted to make something for the show. ”

That seemed like a pretty clear sign inferring that Gazira did not care. that’s what I was keying off of. As before, vacations, probable un-knowing of the “final 5″ all came into play. I feel the response to that was a bit heavy-handed.

I understand that this is very important to all of us. But I have felt the “importance” seem to loom far too much at times. Yes, it’s going into the Public Art Review, and has been in the NYT (a writeup in the mag is more of a mass audience piece than an “art world” thing, take it for what you want).

My personal take is that the BiW folks seem stressed out by all this, and it’s coming across as puffed up. Being that I know what a really nice dude Jay is, I know it’s just stress.

And yes, professionalism is a must for credibility, and being that SL is a largely amateur/hobbyist audience (largely, I say), it is hard to maintain the line between professionalism and friendliness.

It’s all growing pains, IMO, and not that big of a deal.

My first step down the path I propose is to say that a lot of great people have been very devoted, but the load needs to be carried more lightly. If there’s too much work, get to basics and do them better than anyone.

Much love to BiW crowd.
Patrick/Man

I have to take issue with you when you say that Gazira was being harshly criticized here- I was not criticizing her at all– i think she’s very talented, and I she did write to me and didn’t sound upset about the way this all turned out–if i’m wrong I’d like to try to make amends.

you said

I would have been happy to put a soup can out, regardless of whether Jay needed Gaz to be there or not, but I guess the point was more of power than participation, and I don’t agree with that.

You’ve got it totally wrong here. This was not about power, it was about the nature of this particular show. The deal was, each artist in the final five gets a copy of the virtual gallery and they’re supposed to do something with it, or make work in response to it, or in relationship to it- knowing that the visitors to the RL show are going to be looking at the work from inside the real version of that virtual space. That’s why getting in touch with her was so important- it wasn’t just a normal show where you put in a piece and that’s it. And that was not just cause i wanted it to be that way- its cause that’s what i told the JTPP we would be doing so i wanted to be true to my word.