Selecting an artist: open call, limited competition, direct appointment, roster
Selecting an artist for a public art commission is done by one of four methods: an open call, a limited or invited competition, a direct appointment, or a selection from a roster or framework. Every UK commission uses one of the four, and the choice is made before the brief is published. It decides how long selection takes, how much of the budget goes on process, and how defensible the result is when somebody asks why that artist and not another.
The four selection methods compared
The four differ on what the process costs before a work exists, how long it takes, how open it is, and what it suits. Cost below is the cost of running the selection, not the artist fee.
| Method | Cost to the commissioner | Time to appointment | Openness | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open call | Highest: advertising, panel time, sifting, honoraria for a paid shortlist | 3 to 6 months | Highest | Publicly funded work, new sites, a commissioner with no existing relationships |
| Limited or invited competition | Moderate: no sift, but the shortlist is still paid | 2 to 4 months | Limited to those invited | A defined technical problem, a shortlist drawn from a prior open expression of interest |
| Direct appointment | Lowest: no competition to run | 2 to 6 weeks | None | A specific body of work, a very small budget, a fixed and short programme |
| Roster or framework | Low per commission, high once to set up | 2 to 8 weeks | Open at the point the roster is built, closed afterwards | Programmes running several commissions over a few years |
These run from publishing the opportunity to signing, and exclude design development.
The open call
An open call publishes the opportunity to anyone who qualifies and lets artists put themselves forward. It is the default for money that came from the public, because it is the only method that can honestly answer why this artist was chosen: they applied, and they scored highest against published criteria.
What an open call costs is attention. A commission with a reasonable budget in a reasonable place attracts anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred submissions, and every one has to be read. Two devices control that: a two-stage structure, with a short expression of interest judged on relevant experience and a few images at stage one and three to five artists paid to develop proposals at stage two, and a set of published, weighted criteria, so the sift is done against something written down rather than against taste.
Pay the shortlist. Asking artists to produce a site-specific design proposal for nothing transfers the commissioner’s risk onto people who cannot carry it, and the practice is criticised for that reason by artists’ bodies including a-n The Artists Information Company. The honorarium scales to the ask, from a few hundred pounds for a sketch and a statement to low thousands where site visits, engineering input and a costed specification are wanted.
The limited or invited competition
A limited competition invites a fixed number of artists, usually three to six, to compete for one commission, and nobody else can enter. It suits a commission with a hard technical constraint that narrows the field before any judgement of quality is involved: a work that has to be climbable, or carry a lighting load, or be cast in a material only a handful of practices work in at that scale.
Its weakness is that the invitation list is the decision. Whoever writes the list has already chosen the range of possible outcomes, and a list drawn from one person’s address book is a commission decided in private and then dressed as a competition. The usual repair is to build the list from an open expression of interest, which keeps the openness where it changes the result and saves the sifting effort where it does not.
Direct appointment: when it is honest and when it is avoidance
A direct appointment is the honest choice in four situations and a way of avoiding scrutiny in most others. It is honest when the brief asks for something already recognisable as one artist’s practice. It is honest when the budget is genuinely small, because a competition for a mural of a few thousand pounds spends a real share of it on process. It is honest when an artist is carried forward from an earlier stage of the same project, having already been appointed competitively. And it is honest when the programme is fixed and short, such as a work tied to a building opening date a full open call cannot reach.
It is avoidance when the reason is that a competition might produce an artist the client would not have picked, when it follows a phone call from a board member, or when the work is split into pieces to keep each under a threshold. The test is worth applying before the appointment rather than after: write the reason down in one sentence, put it in the project file, and read it as though it had been read out at a public meeting. If it survives that, it is defensible.
Rosters and frameworks
A roster is a pre-selected list of artists, assembled once through an open process, from which commissions are allocated without a new competition each time. Frameworks work the same way in procurement terms and are the usual form for a local authority or a health board. The openness cost is paid once, when the roster is built, and every commission drawn from it afterwards is quick and cheap to award.
Two things go wrong. Rosters go stale, because the artists who applied four years ago are not the artists who would apply now, so a roster needs a fixed term and a reopening date. And they get used to hand work to the same two or three names, so the allocation method inside the roster, whether a mini competition, a rotation or a documented match to the brief, has to be written down when the roster is set up.
What every method needs regardless
Whichever method is used, five things have to exist before the opportunity goes out.
- Publish the criteria, weighted, in the same document as the brief, so applicants know what is being scored.
- Fix the panel before the applications arrive, including who has a vote and who is advising, and record any conflict of interest.
- State the total budget and what it has to cover, so nobody proposes a work the money cannot build.
- Settle the artist fee, the shortlist honorarium and the payment stages before the appointment, not after it.
- Offer feedback to unsuccessful applicants, at least at shortlist stage, because a commissioner who wants good applications next time has to give people a reason to apply again.
Selection ends at appointment, and appointment is not agreement. The scored proposal becomes the approved design only once it is annexed to a signed commission contract.