P3D Re: Competitions

[Paul Talbot <ptww@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Springsteen wrote:

> But there's a difference, to
> me a subtle but important one, between the idea of competing against a
> standard of excellence to be one in a group of the best (think Who's
> Who or the faculty at a great university) and a competition that boils
> down to one-one-one artistic comparisons with the goal of declaring
> winners, ordinal scores, favorites of all, etc (think dog shows, the
> Olympics, professional wrestling).

Well I was just going through some materials from PSA the other day,
and they go to great lengths to point out that acceptances for an
exhibition are strictly relativistic judgements.  To drive home the
point they mention that if a particular exhibition happened to have
only submissions of slides accepted in other exhibitions, that the
usual acceptance percentage would apply, leaving 60% (in the case of
stereo exhibitions) of the entries as "rejects."  Thus, there is no
set "standard of excellence" that applies to distinguish between
accepted and rejected slides in a PSA exhibition.

Paul Talbot


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