How to tell a real open call from a vanity award

Why do open calls charge a fee at all?

Because reading applications costs money. An open call is an invitation for any artist to submit work for consideration, as opposed to being invited directly, and a well run one carries real costs: a selector paid for their day, a coordinator paid for weeks of correspondence, a submissions platform that charges per entry, insurance, and sometimes a share of the exhibition budget itself. Most of those costs are the same whether eighty artists apply or three thousand.

Public funders rarely cover that part. An organisation with a grant for its exhibition programme often has nothing in the budget for the open submission that feeds it. The entry fee closes a small gap. That is the honest version, and it is common.

The dishonest version looks almost identical from the outside. That is the whole difficulty.

How much should an open call entry fee be?

Between nothing and about £35 for a single work, in the UK and most of Europe. Above that, the organiser should be able to tell you what the extra buys.

A juried show is one where a named panel selects from the submissions, which is the thing you are paying for. If nobody is named, you are paying for nothing in particular.

Then do the arithmetic, because it is quick and it tells you a great deal. A prize offering £1,000 to the winner, charging £25, expecting two thousand entries, collects £50,000 and pays out two per cent of it. A prize offering £10,000, charging £20, taking eight hundred entries, is spending considerably more than it takes. Neither number is secret. Organisers who are proud of their figures publish them.

What is a vanity award, and how do you spot one?

A vanity award is a prize whose revenue comes from entrants rather than from an endowment, a sponsor or a funder, and whose real product is flattery: a certificate, a logo for your website, a page in a book nobody will open, a wall in a hotel lobby during a fair week. It is not always a scam in the legal sense. It is usually a poor use of £30.

Seven things to check, none of which takes longer than ten minutes.

1. Find last year's winners. Then find what happened to them. If the winners are listed but the work is not shown, or the names lead nowhere, the prize is producing lists rather than exhibitions.
2. Read the jury. Real names, current roles, and ideally a mention of the prize on their own site or social accounts. Anonymous panels and "a panel of international experts" are the same sentence.
3. Read what you win, literally. Cash, a commission, a solo show with a budget, a studio with dates. Not "international exposure" or "inclusion in our annual publication", which is often an invoice wearing a hat.
4. Count the categories. Forty categories produce forty winners, and forty winners produce forty people willing to buy a trophy.
5. Look for the upsell. Search the prize name alongside the word "selected" and see whether acceptance is followed by a request for money. If acceptance costs more than entry, the model is the money.
6. Check the organisation exists. In the UK, Companies House and the Charity Commission register are free and take a minute. Elsewhere, the national company register does the same job. A prize claiming charitable status that is not on a register has told you something.
7. Look for an address. A venue, a street, a city. Online-only prizes can be legitimate, but an online prize with a physical-sounding name and no venue is selling the sound of the name.

Is it a red flag when an art prize charges a hanging fee?

Usually, yes. A hanging fee is a charge to the artist for wall space after the work has been accepted, on top of whatever was paid to enter. There are narrow exceptions. Artist-run cooperatives where every member shares the rent openly are one. Art fairs, where you are plainly renting a stand and know it, are another.

Outside those, a hanging fee combined with a selection process is a contradiction. Either the work was chosen on merit, in which case the venue wants it, or the wall is for sale, in which case there was no selection. Watch in particular for the combination of entry fee, hanging fee and a sales commission of fifty per cent. Commission is the share of any sale the venue keeps, and thirty to fifty per cent is normal in a commercial gallery that is also paying for your framing, insurance, photography and invitations. Fifty per cent charged by a venue you have already paid twice is rent.

The direction of travel in the sector runs the other way. The a-n Paying Artists campaign has spent a decade arguing that publicly funded galleries should pay exhibition fees to artists, and in Canada the CARFAC minimum fee schedule makes those payments a published standard. Knowing that exists is useful even when it does not apply to you. It sets the baseline from which a hanging fee is a departure.

Who owns the copyright to images you submit?

You do, and you keep it. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 in the UK, and in substance across the countries signed up to the Berne Convention, copyright arises automatically when the work is made and belongs to the artist unless it is assigned in writing. Assignment means handing the copyright over permanently. No reasonable open call asks for it.

What changes between one set of terms and another is the licence, meaning permission to use the image within stated limits. A fair licence is non-exclusive, limited to promotion of the prize or exhibition, and expires. Read closely for the words perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sub-licensable appearing together. That combination lets the organiser use your image forever, for anything, including things they sell, and pass that right to someone else.

Two other clauses are worth finding before you pay. Who insures the physical work while it is in their care, and who pays carriage both ways. And whether the prize is an acquisition prize, meaning the organiser keeps the work itself as part of the award. That can be an excellent outcome, since it places a piece in a collection. It should never be a surprise.

How many artists usually apply to an open call?

It ranges from under a hundred to well over ten thousand. A regional juried show might see two to four hundred submissions for forty places. A funded residency with a stipend and studio commonly draws several hundred for two or three places. The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, open to anyone who pays the per-work fee, hangs on the order of 1,500 works and has reported entries in the tens of thousands.

You are allowed to ask. Email the coordinator and ask how many applications they received last year and how many were shown. Organisations running a real selection answer that question easily, often with some pride. Silence is an answer too.

And budget across the year rather than per call. Twenty applications at £25 is £500, which is a kiln repair, a year of studio insurance, or four good stretchers. Decide what the annual figure is before you start, not in March when something appealing lands in your inbox.

How do you decide whether to pay, in practice?

Four questions, in this order.

1. Name the one thing acceptance changes. A curator who will see the work. A fee. A line that makes the next funding application stronger. If you cannot name it in a sentence, do not pay.
2. Cost the whole thing. Entry fee, framing, crate, courier both ways, insurance, train fare to the opening. The £25 is rarely the expense.
3. Check the fit honestly. Most rejections are about scale, medium or theme, not quality. Reading the previous three years of selected work tells you more than the call text does.
4. Write it down. What you entered, which work, which images, the deadline, the outcome.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A practice generates a surprising amount of application history, and almost none of it is recoverable from memory two years later. Which version of the statement went where, which image file, whether the piece was already promised elsewhere on those dates. Keeping a register of works and where they have been turns the question of whether to apply into a short one, and it is easier with something built for it than with a folder of drafts.

Samlio lists the entry fee on every open call in the calendar, including the calls where the fee is clearly the business model, and we take no payment from organisers for a listing. It is the only reason we are in a position to write this. If you want to see how wide the range is, the European open calls and residencies guide is a reasonable place to start, and the portfolio piece covers what to send once you have decided a call is worth it.