Ted Noten

Entering the huge gallery space in Legnica where tables were packed with jewellery items I immediately realised that the only way to find the winners was to radically throw out the pieces that clearly were -let's call it "I still have something in the drawer to send".
That was the easy part of the judging and all of us were pretty agreeable about getting rid of the pieces that had no fight with the theme "Exclusive".

To be honestly said and bespoken with the honourable organisers the theme was too broad. Keywords in the criteria such as branding/value/marketing seemed to be impossible for most contestant to include in their designs, let alone in the theme "Exclusive".

Thus the branding and marketing  part for me was the most challenging and unfortunately hardly any participant took advantage of this item to make a strong statement about the jewellery/design/art world. A pity. Why is it that we jewellery makers are avoiding the engagement? We are a very professional group within the disciplines of art, we have good schools/good networks (galleries all over the world), we have
internet sites-discussion platforms and so on. And still it seems we don't want to take part in the "big" world. Is it our attitude related to the vulnerable almost hermetic aura which is indissoluble to our proffesion? As a jewellery maker you can't nail big confronting huge statements?

Nevertheless after 5 hours it was clear what the winners had in common. Hardly any connection to the subthemes and the fact that they didn't use silver as main part of the work. The jury has broken through this tradition by doing so. But certainly originality-struggle-and more layers were present in the winner's works. The most hard-to-understand pieces where striking our skin. A good piece is not about clarifying something but more about questioning.

I would like to finish my text with a manifest I wrote 2 years ago;

Jewellery must be sentimental and never look for compromise
Jewellery must be owned by the public
Jewellery must steal and seek to be stolen
Jewellery must cherish its enemies in order to make friends
Jewellery must forget the psychoanalysis of the studio
Jewellery must go out into the street to eat and be eaten
Jewellery must be shamelessly curious
Jewellery must look where to attack and neglect its defences
Jewellery must use traditional codes in order to break them
Jewellery must neither forgive nor forget
Jewellery must ignore all prescriptions

And of course to the organisers: keep on going with this beautiful yearly event, Globalize it even more and thanks for all your efforts.