What Do Judges Look For in Art Competitions?

Every entrant asks the same question after a rejection: what were they looking for? The honest answer is less mysterious than it feels. Most juries score a small set of qualities, and most entries lose points for a small set of avoidable reasons, several of them before a juror has looked closely at the work at all.

This guide sets out the criteria nearly every jury uses, how blind scoring works in practice, and what you can do about each of them before you submit.

The criteria nearly every jury uses

Competition rules phrase them differently, and school rubrics break them into more boxes, but the same five qualities come up again and again:

• Response to the theme. Not illustration of it. A juror wants to see the theme interpreted, and a work that could be entered in any competition usually scores as though it had been.
• Originality. Whether the work makes a choice the juror has not already seen many times that day.
• Execution. Control of the medium: edges, surface, exposure, finish. Not polish for its own sake, but control of whatever the work sets out to do.
• Composition. How the image holds together at the size it is seen, which in an online competition is a screen.
• Overall impression. The part rubrics find hardest to define and jurors find easiest to feel: whether the work stays with them after they move on.

How blind, independent scoring works

At Curatone.art every entry is scored independently by each member of the jury on a ten-point scale, and no juror sees another’s score. The final score is the average across the panel, and the award tier follows from it, as the competition rules set out. Many serious competitions work in a similar way, and it changes what matters.

With no discussion, there is nobody in the room to argue for a difficult work. Each score has to come from what is on the screen and in the statement. A work that needs explaining in person is at a disadvantage; a work that makes its case at a glance, and rewards a second look, is not.

Averaging also smooths out personal taste. One juror’s dislike of a style costs a point, not the result. What survives the average is quality that most trained eyes agree on.

Selection versus award: why “how to win” is the wrong first question

Most competitions make two decisions. First, which works are selected as finalists; then, among those, which receive awards. Both are scored on the same qualities, but they are not the same bar.

Selection is the decision that builds a record. A finalist result in a juried international competition is a line on a CV that stays there. An award is a smaller decision on top of it. Aiming every entry at the top prize tends to produce safe work chosen to please; aiming at selection produces the strongest work you actually have.

What loses points before a juror looks closely

These are the reasons good work scores below its level, and every one of them can be fixed:

• The photograph. In an online competition the jury scores a JPEG. A colour cast, glare, a tilted frame or a crop that includes the easel is scored as part of the work. See How to Photograph Artwork for Online Submissions.
• A loose connection to the theme. If the link is not visible, say it in the statement. If it cannot be said in a sentence, consider a different work.
• A statement that restates the image. See How to Write an Artist Statement.
• Uneven entries. Where more than one work is allowed, a weaker third piece does not add a chance; it lowers the impression the first two made.
• The wrong category. A work judged against the wrong peers is judged on the wrong terms.

Choosing which works to enter

1. Start from the theme, not from your newest work. Jurors score the artwork, not when it was made.
2. Look at your candidates at thumbnail size. That is the first view a juror gets, and the work that still reads is the one to lead with.
3. Enter fewer, stronger works. Up to three is common. Three is a maximum, not a target.
4. Keep the set coherent. Works that clearly come from one practice make each other more convincing.

Reading your result, and the jury protocol

A result without scores tells you only yes or no. Competitions that issue an evaluation protocol, a record of how the work was scored, give you something to act on: a wide spread between jurors means the work divided opinion, while uniformly middling scores usually mean the image rather than the idea held it back.

At Curatone.art, finalists receive the evaluation protocol with their diploma, and results are kept in the public winners archive. You can see what the documents look like in the certificate examples.

For the view from the other side of the table, our piece on why judging art competitions is an underrated career move describes what jurors actually do. And the current open calls are the place to put all of this into practice.