Before you enter any type of art competition or contract for that matter, make sure you read the terms and conditions. Sometimes, the prize isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and some prizes even border on deceptive and misleading conduct.
Read the Terms and Conditions carefully as your information may be gathered to be on-sold to other companies who will try to market to you. That means more spam, and even sponsors of such competitions might find their own email databases hijacked by the promoter and sold to the highest bidder (their competition).
Under law, a promotor has the right to conduct a prize without a permit, provided that the prize is awarded ramdonly and that there is no entry fee. If there is an entry fee there must be a prize awarded for skill, so that the award is not based on luck.
Some competitions may state that the prize-winner is chosen randomly, however one must remain suspicious if one of the rules of the same competition is that you must assign over the copyright of your artwork. That means, the promoter may place your image on t-shirts or anything else for that matter, sell them, and they do not have to give you any royalties or fees for the use of the image, or even promote the artist who created the artwork. This is morally and ethically wrong, and NAVA, the National Association of Visual Arts, frowns upon this immoral activity.
Remember, always read the Terms and Conditions of competitions, especially if it involves your intellectual property, or if you have privacy concerns.
When competitions like this are advertised, it is my personal theory that the award will be given to someone with advanced abilities, rather than to a beginner or someone unknown to the promoter, as this would add a greater chance that the final image assigned over to the promoter would be one worth hanging onto. Unfortunately this is hard to prove, however be warned, I think it is entirely in the realm of possiblity.
Looking at many of the art prizes that are handed out today, at least in Queensland, I strongly believe constitute a breach of gaming regulations. When some prizes are awarded, most people wonder where is the skill in that? Of course the art critic, the art historian and the gallery dealer with talk about track record, that the artist is edgy, young (discrimatory), emerging (also considered to be young therefore discriminatory), so that the whole industry is in bed with itself. There can be no semblance of objectivity in art, if strict rules concerning skill are not adhered to.
It is ironic that the Turner Prize, handed out by the Tate Modern in Britain, and named after the famous painter, is now handed out to people who cannot draw and don’t paint. The use of projectors is not cool or modern, it is plain speaking nothing short of cheating, as there is no skill required to trace. If this government regulation were enforced, then the artists who deserve to be awarded prizes would be recognised, and the people who can’t draw, who have no imagination or vision (photoshop becomes the same as using a projector) and can’t paint should be left to be a legend in their own mind.
In order to bring skill back into art, perhaps a class action or two against a high profile art prize would help to turn the tide of opinion about what constitutes art and skill?