In recent years, the “open call” has become an almost unavoidable mechanism within the contemporary jewelry landscape. Across the globe, major exhibitions, competitive grants, international residencies, and bustling festival weeks increasingly rely on this digital format as a seemingly democratic way of discovering fresh artistic talent and generating broad cultural visibility. Yet, beneath the veneer of universal access, a growing chorus of critical voices has begun to emerge from within the community. Why are artists and curators questioning a system designed to open doors? Behind the rhetoric of radical openness often lies an extractive administrative structure in which creators bear an escalating share of the bureaucratic labor, financial risk, and emotional investment.
This critical examination of contemporary infrastructure traces its roots back to a compelling roundtable discussion titled Open Calls and Contemporary Jewelry, held on November 22, 2025, at the DIVA museum in Antwerp during the Obsessed! festival. Skillfully moderated by art historian Saskia van Es, the panel brought together a diverse group of cultural practitioners: artists Into Niilo and Liesbet Bussche, freelance curator Ebba Van der Taelen, and Tom Iriks, curator at DIVA and author of these reflections. As the conversation unfolded, one stark reality quickly became clear: organizers and applicants frequently view the open-call ecosystem through entirely different lenses, exposing a profound disconnect between institutional convenience and artistic survival.
Rejection as Part of Professional Life
The discussion commenced with Van Es projecting slides of the provocative installation Open Calls by artist Ana Escobar Saavedra, a work directly inspired by Rachel Mason’s seminal essay Artist as Applicant. Mason has long described a shifting cultural landscape where the daily labor of the professional artist gradually migrates away from the workbench and the physical creation of art, replaced instead by the relentless administrative grind of submitting applications, writing statements, and filling out digital forms.
Escobar’s installation physically manifests this bureaucratic trap, consisting of a glass cube intricately engraved with the ubiquitous phrases found in open calls across the international art world. Visitors read stark mandates such as “Work must fit in 30 x 30 x 30 centimetres,” “We only exhibit wearable jewelry,” and the familiar exclusionary gatekeeping of “Applicants must be under 35.” The artwork functions as an almost poetic metaphor for the open-call system itself: the defining rules and parameters are neatly trapped inside a rigid glass enclosure, leaving the artist with barely enough room to breathe or experiment.
The second component of Escobar’s installation, titled Maybe Next March, meticulously reproduces the standard rejection email dispatched for years by the organizers of Schmuck in Munich. It begins with the familiar formula: “Dear Artist, we are sorry to inform you that your work was not selected for Schmuck [fill in the year],” concluding with a polite invitation to nevertheless travel to Munich at one’s own expense. In this context, rejection is systematically routinized—transformed into an automated form of institutional politeness that manufactures immediate proximity while producing profound economic and emotional distance.
A bitter, knowing laugh moved through the audience as these slides were presented. Most contemporary artists have long since learned to accept rejection as an inevitable, uncompensated part of professional life. However, the true arbitrariness of certain selection criteria became painfully sharp when the panel shifted its focus to age limits. Artists who do not follow a traditional, linear career path—or those who choose to pivot later in life—often find themselves summarily excluded before they have even been given the chance to establish a foothold in the field.
While age restrictions are routinely defended by institutions as a noble form of support for “emerging artists,” this defense relies on the flawed assumption that emerging automatically equates to being young. In reality, many creators begin their artistic journeys later in life, transition from entirely different careers, or gain access to higher education and essential resources much later than their peers. Consequently, a mechanism intended to foster accessibility easily morphs into an effective instrument of exclusion.
The Open Call Fan Club
Open calls ultimately reveal a great deal about how contemporary jewelry understands, values, and organizes itself as an autonomous discipline. During the Antwerp roundtable, the term itself proved slippery, simultaneously referring to a democratic opportunity, a practical selection tool, a curatorial method, a market-driven business model, and an online networking platform.
From the perspective of a museum curator and public mediator at DIVA, the open call often functions as an invaluable pragmatic instrument. Scouting emerging international talent demands significant time and travel resources, whereas a well-publicized open call brings unfamiliar, exciting work directly to an institution’s attention. Yet, this institutional utility does not blind curators to the system’s structural flaws. Listening back to the audio recording of the roundtable, the sentiment remains clear: the format is worth saving, but only if it is executed with genuine care and ethical rigor. The problem is not necessarily the existence of open calls per se, but the lazy way they are increasingly deployed as a default administrative band-aid for structural shortages of time, institutional resources, and imaginative curating.
For panelist Ebba Van der Taelen, founder of Unpolished—a dedicated platform for emerging Belgian jewelry artists—the open call played a very specific foundational role. Because the platform was expressly established to carve out space for unfamiliar and underrepresented voices, an open call felt like the most natural starting point. When organizing an exhibition centered around the delicate themes of identity and transformation, Van der Taelen invited artists to submit their portfolios, ensuring the final selection served not only as a cohesive exhibition, but equally as the platform’s foundational curatorial statement.
Yet, even within this grassroots context, the idealistic vision of absolute openness quickly collided with stubborn practical limitations. The call was launched immediately before the peak of the summer holidays, a period when academic institutions and studios are largely dormant. Promotion of the opportunity relied heavily on Instagram advertisements and organic online circulation. Long before a jury ever convened to make a selection, digital visibility was already actively shaping and filtering the outcome. Artists first had to encounter the call in their feeds, manage to meet rigid criteria, and possess the requisite free time and financial resources to pull together a professional portfolio during the dead of summer. Thus, a platform striving for open accessibility remained tethered to the opaque algorithms and seasonal calendars that govern modern digital visibility.
Open Call Season
Standing in stark contrast to the institutional perspective of the organizer is the lived reality of the applicant. Artist Into Niilo vividly described the modern application cycle as a grueling endurance marathon concentrated heavily around the months of October and November—jokingly dubbed “open call season.” Niilo also compared the exhausting process to a form of quiet gambling, evoking the poignant image of artists tossing fragile glass bottles into a vast ocean in the desperate hope that someone on a distant shore might eventually respond.
Beyond the emotional toll of constant uncertainty, this gambling metaphor reflects severe economic realities. Artists routinely pay non-refundable application fees, steep international transport costs, and specialized insurance premiums out of their own pockets. Many are also expected to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses if selected, simply because institutional budgets rarely stretch to cover participation fees. All of this uncompensated financial exposure occurs on top of the vast mountain of unpaid labor required to prepare detailed portfolios, exhaustive artist statements, high-resolution photographs of work, and complex application forms.
As a result, a massive portion of financial and administrative risk has quietly shifted away from the organizing institutions and landed squarely on the shoulders of individual artists. For cash-strapped galleries and museums, the open call offers a streamlined, highly efficient method of harvesting massive quantities of submissions with minimal labor. For the artist, however, participation has devolved into a speculative financial investment with zero guarantee of visibility, critical dialogue, sales, or financial remuneration.
Curatorial Poverty
Panelist Liesbet Bussche voiced deep, principled hesitation regarding her own participation in open calls. Her criticism targets not only the logistical mechanics of the format, but also the rich curatorial traditions that open calls have systematically replaced. Bussche openly laments the vanishing era of deeply researched, well-curated exhibitions built around substantive themes, rigorous intellectual criteria, and long-term, collaborative engagement between curators and artists.
According to Bussche, open calls too frequently result in superficial “one-piece shows”—exhibitions that arbitrarily restrict participants to presenting just a single work per artist. Within such crowded configurations, complex artworks can rarely be presented as their creators originally intended, leaving virtually no room for contextual framing, let alone expansive narrative arcs. Jewelry is forcibly reduced to an isolated object that must single-handedly represent an entire artistic practice while aggressively competing for fleeting attention among dozens of neighboring submissions.
In these crowded gallery spaces, jewelry risks being entirely detached from the intimate stories, conceptual frameworks, and material explorations that give it meaning. During the roundtable discussion, this dynamic was aptly described as a form of narrative theft. Jewelry is fundamentally a medium of human stories, yet open-call exhibitions frequently present objects stripped of their narrative context. Consequently, the open call threatens to devolve into a mere distribution mechanism for isolated luxury goods rather than serving as a genuine curatorial proposition. It produces little more than a sprawling accumulation of objects rather than a coherent intellectual argument.
Bussche further contends that art academies and universities must begin equipping students with the critical tools needed to rigorously assess open calls. Because these systems routinely divorce ideas from their physical and cultural contexts, young artists learn to treat their work less as an evolving component of an ongoing practice and more as a portable, flattened image circulating within a hyper-competitive attention economy.
Transparency and Responsibility
One of the most illuminating moments of the Antwerp symposium occurred when the panel conducted a side-by-side comparative reading of two distinct calls issued by respected organizations: a themed group exhibition organized by the WearHouse in Amsterdam and the prestigious Italian Montebello Award. The exercise gradually revealed that these initiatives represented two fundamentally different operational models, with one functioning primarily as a curated group show and the other operating strictly as a competitive prize.
This conceptual distinction is vital because the broad umbrella term open call is now indiscriminately applied to vastly different operational systems. Hiding beneath a single label are open-submission exhibitions, competitive prizes, international residencies, seasonal festivals, and digital networking platforms, each carrying entirely distinct expectations, power relations, and economic models.
Throughout the afternoon, the conversation repeatedly gravitated toward the core issue of institutional responsibility. What does “openness” actually mean when selection criteria remain distressingly vague, when organizers provide little to no background information, or when artists alone must absorb the heavy costs of production, shipping, and physical attendance? True openness without operational clarity does not foster genuine accessibility; it merely breeds administrative confusion and frustration.
Concluding the roundtable reflections, the participants issued a collective call for a paradigm shift: moving away from “openness as marketing” and toward “openness as responsibility.” This vision champions an ethical framework in which transparency, deep contextual framing, fair financial compensation, and shared institutional care return to the forefront of cultural production.
If contemporary jewelry is to maintain its vital relationship to the human body—valuing intimacy, tactile touch, personal storytelling, and the rich social life of physical objects—the field must urgently interrogate which infrastructures genuinely sustain those values over the long term.
The critical insights harvested during the roundtable have also been translated into a set of practical recommendations for both organizers and applicants. Designed as an accessible checklist, these guidelines address pressing concerns regarding transparency, fair compensation, structured selection procedures, and ethical curatorial responsibility, serving as a concrete tool to foster more accountable and sustainable practices across the discipline.
Ana Escobar’s engraved glass cube ultimately remains a painfully fitting symbol for the contemporary moment: a transparent structure that simultaneously encloses and restricts. As the contemporary jewelry community looks to the future, the central question is no longer how institutional glass might be polished to look more attractive, but rather who is still afforded enough air to breathe safely within it.
