Predatory and Scammy Art Calls

Part of an artist’s professional practice is regularly exhibiting artwork in solo and group shows. Solo shows involve their own processes, so this post will focus on group exhibitions.

Artists join galleries, cooperatives, or clubs that offer exhibitions, build networks that invite them to various opportunities, and browse aggregated lists of open calls. There’s always been a spectrum to the types of calls out there in terms of their advantages and disadvantages to the artists, but the pandemic unfortunately fostered a boom in predatory and scammy listings.

Let’s just start with a description of the general process: most group exhibition calls have application fees that range from $15-75, which you pay just to be considered. If you are fortunate enough to be accepted and the exhibition is not local, artists are typically expected to pay for the artwork transportation costs (either driving and delivering the work in person to regional sites or outbound-and-return shipping to further afield locations). If artwork is damaged in transit (two of my pieces this year have been due to poor packing on the gallery’s end, as they arrived in showable condition, were exhibited, and then returned to me with broken frames), it’s also on the artist to pay for repairs.

Some shows do have cash awards which can help tip the financial equation back into the artist’s favor, but typically only a couple of pieces receive prizes - so a common scenario might be that 300 artists pay $40 to enter 3 pieces for consideration for Exhibition X, 35 artists’ 50 artworks might be accepted and those artists spend an average of $100 on shipping, and then the top two juror’s choice artworks receive prizes of $500 and $250. The $11,250 raised in the application process beyond the show awards pays for the show advertising and listing fees on aggregation websites, juror honorariums, gallery overhead, and reception catering. 465 artists pay $40 and get rejected, 33 artists pay $140 and participate in the show, and 2 artists respectively net profit $360 and $110 and participate in the show.

While I have won a number of cash awards at shows, my overall application and exhibition record is financially net negative. So why do it? Well, it is a cost of being in this business, much like licensing fees, union membership, or uniforms can be in some industries. In the world of academia in particular, your artistic profile is in part judged based on your exhibition record. Exhibitions can come with benefits beyond prizes, too - they may lead to artwork sales, press coverage, juror requests, and additional opportunities.

There are good, meh, and bad calls out there. Good calls tend to have free to low application fees, physical gallery shows as well as digital access, prizes, and a sizeable audience of viewers. Meh calls might cost more than you’d like to apply, don’t come with prizes or reserve the prizes for an in-group (prizes go to members of X collective), or may have too general a call such that they’re pretty intentionally aiming to raise money rather than seeking out specific subsets of artists/artwork for their real show vision, but nevertheless have physical gallery shows and a sizeable audience of viewers. Bad calls are clear cash grabs - they are often online-only shows with application fees or are “free to enter and a small fee for selected artists” but then accept every artist, and don’t actually have an audience of viewers. These predatory organizations also usually host numerous online “shows” simultaneously, because the purpose isn’t highlighting the artwork - it’s to rake in as many fees as possible.

There were always a few predatory organizations, and it can be tricky to tell the difference between meh and bad sometimes, particularly with newly-launched ones. But during the pandemic, a lot of shows were forced to move online and it masked which organizations were illegitimate, which simultaneously encouraged the growth of scammy sites and inculcated worse standards in inexperienced artists.

The aggregation website Call For Entry, or CaFÉ, used to be the industry standard aggregation website, with EntryThingy in second and Submittable in third. I say CaFÉ “used to be” the industry standard because it’s now verging on the unethical by allowing bad, pay-to-play companies to drown out the real calls (presumably they allow it because those companies pay CaFÉ per listing). Though I never kept track, I’d guess that I used to see 1 bad call for every 10 meh or good calls; now on CaFÉ it’s more like 10 bad calls for every 1 meh or good call.

I think there’s now space for a newcomer to create a better listing engine that filters or eliminates those bad calls entirely, or maybe real art organizations just need to use Submittable more. EntryThingy is OK, but it’s always had suboptimal UI - but now that CaFÉ has sold out, maybe EntryThingy is better for the time being?

Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby Part II

If you haven’t read my blog post titled “Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby,” I recommend you do that first, as this is a follow-up!

To recap: plants, notably the Philodendron ‘Pink Congo,’ that have been gassed (or occasionally painted) with ethylene to induce a temporary discoloration that may appear to unsuspecting buyers as a permanent variegation have begun to enter the houseplant trade. At the time of my first post, ‘Pink Congo’ was the only affected type I could list with specificity, but I mentioned that others were out there.

This spring, I’ve so far noticed two more pop up on one of the Facebook groups for houseplants - and this time, they’re both succulents. The first is Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple’ and the second is Sinocrassula yunnanensis. Here are a couple screenshots I took of the plants for sale - in the second picture, it’s the middle row of plants that are impacted. Both were advertised as being Korean imports.

View fullsize

View fullsize

With the Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple,’ people challenged the seller who initially defended these plants as untreated, natural variegation, but then a day later returned and admitted that upon follow-up, her importer confirmed that they were fakes. However, at least when I saw it, the Sinocrassula yunnanensis sales post made by a different seller hadn’t attracted any questions or consternation.

To me, both plants look really unnatural and kind of diseased or wrong, but then again I am deep in the hobby and know what plants ought to look like - I also think painted succulents and dyed and fake flowers look bad, so clearly my taste isn’t everyone’s as those treatments do have a ready audience in more amateur growers! I do wholeheartedly believe that any altered plant - whether it be gassed with ethylene, painted, dyed, glued with false flowers, etc. - should come with a clear label that lays out what has been done, the lifespan of the manipulation, and the impact to the health of the plant.

Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby

There have always been scandals in the world of houseplants. Big box stores selling dyed and painted plants, cacti and succulents with dried and dyed strawflowers glued on, injected orchid spikes (spoiler - there are no naturally blue Phalaenopsis), doomed plants in glass baubles, and glued-down top dressing are some common ones. Though more specialized nurseries tend not to commit those no-nos, many do sell tinted tillandsia and single Hoya kerrii leaves without stem cuttings that will never grow without any disclaimers. Some online sellers will purposefully mislabel or sell inert seeds or parts of a plant for propagation that will never be able to grow as well, relying on time, relative cost, and the ever-present risk inherent in attempting to grow seeds or propagate to erase any blame. And now there’s a new scandal rocking the houseplant world, the full scope is still in the process of being uncovered!

Let me first set the stage. If you, like me, have been in the houseplant hobby for decades, you might have noticed that it’s become quite the fad lately. There were (and still are!) some good online forums and blogs fifteen years ago, but recently I’ve witnessed the rise of “plantubers” aka YouTube stars who do surprisingly well discussing plants, Facebook groups, and - though I’m not that active on the platform - I’ve heard tell of Instagram plant influencers, aka plantfluencers. The rise of these various social media houseplant stars and societies has helped shape what is the must-have plant and drives demand for large swathes of new hobbyists. For whatever reason, right now monstera, philodendron, rarer pothos, and calathea are all hot commodities but the variegated and atypically colored ones are by far the most sought after. I actually don’t grow any of those types of plants aside from a small Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ at the moment; I had an early experience killing a calathea and have never felt called to try again, pothos to me seem common as dirt so while I don’t mind them I also don’t prioritize them, and while I like philodendrons including monstera a lot, they’re often large plants and I’d prefer to be able to have ten or twenty plants in the space where one philodendron might live. My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ is a pretty plant though; its new growth comes in reddish orange and then over time it ages to a green. I think it cost either $3 or $4 because I bought it as a baby.

My Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ plunked behind several other plants on my outside shade table this summer.

I have joined or been added to quite a few of the Facebook plant groups over the years, and many are for buying and selling. I’ve always found most of the pricing on Facebook for plants to be overly high, so I think I’ve only purchased maybe three plants total from such listings. It turns out that even bearing that in mind, I was still apparently only in the more reasonably priced groups until a few weeks ago. At that time, I was invited to join two “plant purge” Facebook groups. The biggest is nuts, though I dislike the format and atmosphere of both. These groups structure their sales to be very small quantity buy-now-or-you-miss-it opportunities and build up excitement by dangling the most coveted plants ahead of time without prices and then “opening up” the sale hours to days later. This very intentionally is not meant to encourage calm research and reflection but rather hype, panic, and instant gratification; it’s basically gambling. People are buying individual plants for hundreds of dollars, regularly, in a flurry of adrenaline and a heady sense of exclusivity that rarely is accurate. Enter Philodendron ‘Pink Princess.’ It’s a variegated philodendron that has the same general shape, growth, size, and habit as my ‘Prince of Orange’ but it has green-base leaves with splashes of pink and sometimes cream variegation. It used to be sold for approximately the same price point as other philodendrons - typically somewhere between $6-20 per plant depending on size and store. Its explosion in popularity due to plant influencers means it now typically costs between $100-300 per plant, and that’s when you can find one at all. Pink is a very “in” coloration for the Instagram and Youtube plant crowd.

You now have the backstory. Recently a newcomer variegated philodendron arrived on the scene: Philodendron ‘Pink Congo’. (Newcomers do arrive sometimes - there are hybridizers and tissue culture cloners that introduce interesting new plants to the industry.) ‘Pink Congo’ was positioned and understood to be much like my ‘Prince of Orange’ in its growth habit but with pink leaves instead of orange. However, photos of ‘Pink Congo’ differed from ‘Prince of Orange.’ There were just dark green outer leaves and bright pink inner leaves. A few pictures appeared to show a different type of transition, where green patches started developing on some of the older pink leaves as opposed to the slow and total hue change on the entire leaf as per ‘Prince of Orange.'

From what I’ve read, people started paying $70-100 for ‘Pink Congo’ - mostly on these rabid Facebook groups but also occasionally on nursery websites, Instagram, eBay, and Etsy - and prices escalated from there. Then a knowledgeable hobbyist dropped a bomb on Facebook - the ‘Pink Congo’ was a fake and he had source material from an Indian vendor to prove it. He showed that the pink central leaf coloration was a temporary reaction to being gassed by ethylene and the plant would revert back to its standard green coloration in several months to a year or two and never grow more pink again. The base plant would typically sell in a $4-20 range.

Apparently some houseplant sellers knew it all along and were fine with it. Others didn’t, and decided to eat their own loss in having purchased the plants for resale so as not to lose credibility and trust. Many continue to sell them but added vaguely worded disclaimers that can be easily misinterpreted to give false hope. Meanwhile, a lot of buyers are upset that they dropped triple digits on temporary variegation, but some claim they don’t mind and plan to continue to buy ‘Pink Congo.’ A few have shared a belief that the scandal itself is the hoax, and that if anyone’s plant is reverting that it’s just an unstable variegation rather than a systemic fake.

And that’s the current scandal!

Wait… I did say it was still unfolding, so what’s that about? Apparently, philodendrons are not going to be the only ethylene-treated plants coming out of the import market! (Dun dun dun!) As far as I know, no one’s listed any other implicated plant varieties with specificity yet, but it’s a new ploy to be aware of across the hobby. I don’t know what other plants’ responses to being gassed with ethylene might look like, so any very unusual and new coloration might warrant a critical eye these days.