Dear Artist: You Have Poor Taste
Posted at 6:26 AM Apr 07, 2008
When I first got an email from Terence Healy a few months ago, he was seeking advice on where he might be able to exhibit a series of 18 erotic paintings he'd been working on. When I followed the link in his email to the series, Tit Cruxificion, I'm pretty sure I said "wow" out loud. He's been submitting his work to some art festivals and juried shows with open calls, hoping to get the work some exposure, and last week he emailed me his first rejection letter.
Hi Terence,
Thanks for submitting a proposal for "Tit Crucifixion" at Bumbershoot 2008.
Sorry to say we didn't choose your work for inclusion at the festival. Because of the large number of applications and limited space, we couldn't accept everything even most things that we liked.
Your work, however, wasn't among the work we liked; in fact we found it rather demeaning in its objectification of women. Of course we support your free expression as an artist, but your worldview seems rather 
misanthropic, and we have to ask, what makes you think that a general audience would find inspiring or engaging about this work?
Thank you, ultimately, for making us plan on clarifying our call for submissions, in which we ask for "high quality visual art exhibits with strong concepts that engage, surprise, amuse, and intrigue our audience." You certainly have a strong concept that would surprise our audience, but only due to its poor taste.
Your work might find a home in a smaller gallery or with a sympathetic curator elsewhere; for our festival, however, we have to pass.
Sincerely,
Bob Redmond
That's a great example of a rejection letter suitable for framing - or at least the twenty-first century version, reposting it on the internet!
It's also a great letter to kick off Naked City's Daily Voyeur. I've spent a few years mixed in with art, porn and the ever-controversial space in between, and in this series you'll get a daily peek at all kinds of sexy stuff across the whole spectrum. Frankly, I don't really care whether people call this stuff art or porn - it's about sex and looks cool, and that's about all I need to get my brains and loins fired up.
--Audacia Ray
more: Daily Voyeur
That rejection letter is a work of art.
While the artist's work pushes the pop surrealism envelope and would be deemed as obscene by many it isn't misanthropic. Neither is it a demeaning objectification of women.
The curator should have just rejected the application and kept his his opinion where it belongs, up his ass. You know, the same place he keeps his brain.
Opinions and assholes, everybody's got em! That was mine.
Posted by: Ken at April 7, 2008 6:35 PM
