Book will be another carefully curated artist-led online group show brought to you once more by Cultivate. Another busy show, Book will be the second online contemporary exhibition of 2022 from London's artist-led Cultivate gallery/collective. Once again most of the artists will be directly invited but the open call element and hearing from artists we don't know yet is important.

The previous show featured 43 artists from all over the land and the globe, around 24 came via the open call. We are very picky, our door is open though, new artistic blood is important. This will be the 19th online exhibition from Cultivate and we think, if we’ve counted it right, the 172nd Cultivate art show in all. Artists who have taken part in previous shows are welcome to submit again (as long as they did their bit in terms of word spreading last time, we don't ask for a fee but we do ask for participation in terms of posting about these shows.

Please read all of this, I know how long it is but it will save us all time. You'd be amazed at how many people just don't bother reading these things and just send us tedious photographs of red telephone boxes taken on their phone or pieces of digital/video art and then get all hissy pissy with us when we say no.

Book will open online at 7pm on Tuesday February 22nd via the Organ magazine website at www.organthing.com.  We will once again be personally inviting the majority of the artists, but as always the flow of artistic new blood is very important. There is an open call aspect, and we would like to have at least a dozen artists we don’t actually know yet, we also welcome those who have shown with us before to submit again. Please do check out one of the the recent previous online shows here on the Organ website to get a flavour of what we do and what we're looking for, one of the most recent online show with an open call element was the Still show, or go check out the Alright? show or the most recent one Deflect.

Theme? This time we DO have a theme, we're looking for art that relates to Book in some kind of way.  Once again, as with the previous online shows, we are looking for exciting painters, installation artists, 3D artists, in fact Book is open to artists of all disciplines besides photography or digital/video art (nothing against either discipline and there are plenty of online outlets for both, this online show is not about digital art or photography), and the one thing we really don't want is a flat lifeless image of a painting, have a look at one of the the last shows, go grab a flavour and a feel, make your image feel like a piece of art hanging on a gallery wall.  We had a lot of what you might call polite illustration last time, please do check out some of the recent online shows such as Alright? or Recultivate, polite illustration is not really what we're about. And and and, this is important, the images do have to work in terms of an online exhibition, badly taken shots of an instillation or your painting will not work for us.

If you wish to be considered for Book then simply submit no more than five images  with titles and a link to your artist website. The minimum requirement for this online show is that you have a working, well maintained up-to-date artist website that we can link to so people can find out more about you – a working website mind you, not just a Facebook page or an instagram account that full of photos from your last birthday party or what your cat had for dinner today or heaven forbid one of those dreadful Saatchi pages, (an Instagram page that is mostly focused on your art or a Facebook Artist page is more than fine).

The call is open to anyone from anywhere on the planet. There are no fees or costs involved, we’re not paying anything in terms of gallery rents and such for this one so why would we even dream of charging our fellow artists just to open an email or to include you in an online exhibition? Some (vanity) galleries or curators or indeed some of our artists might think the practice is okay and exploiting artists like that is fine but we detest the practice.  Sure, there’s a fair bit of our time involved but hey, we really really (really) don’t like galleries who charge for just opening an email and then claim it to be admin costs, why should anyone ever pay to submit to a show they’re might not even get to take part in? And we really don't get the idea of asking artists to pay to be involved in an online show, as artists we'd certainly not pay! 

All we ask from you, and this is an important bit, is that if you are selected that you put up links and proactively share details on your own websites and properly on your social media feeds, a little more than just a 24 hour "story", post it properly (frankly if you don’t share the link and carry the news on your art pages then you won’t be asked back, I think that’s fair, we will check and if you didn't bother last time then why should we ask you back when you submit again this time?)

If you wish to submit to Book then please do. Once you do we promise to get back as soon as we can, usually within four or five working days (probably faster, although sometimes we need to see how the whole show is shaping as one body of work) will will get with a yes or no as soon as we can, if it is a yes we’ll come back and ask for all the details we need) if it is a no then we will try and take the time to tell you why, as artists ourselves there's nothing we hate more than a rude lazy cut 'n paste rejection.

Deadline is end of day Friday 11th February 2022. Don’t be leaving it until the last minute if you can get something in earlier though, you have more chance if you don’t leave it to the very last minute and the rush from everyone else…

Once again the show is being curated by the Cultivate team of Sean Worrall and Emma Harvey. We are first and foremost working artists. We opened Cultivate because we really didn’t like the often very cynical way most galleries were treating us artists, we like to be treated the way you as artists expect to be treated. Cultivate is an artist-led thing, please leave any art school attitudes outside the front door. We are very much about letting people in but we are very very picky, if we say no, we will politely tell you why rather than just send you a standard rejection. If we say no, it is mostly a reflection of our personal tastes – first, above all else, we need to feel what you do is right for this group show and that being part of the show is right for both you and us, some art really works in an online context, some art, as good as it may be,  simply doesn't fit…

One more thing, we have noticed some people have a habit of submitting the same art as the art we rejected last time, please don’t.  There's one guy who submits the same painting to every call we ever put up here, we keep telling him why we're saying no, we'll probably just hit the decline button for him this time, there are only so many hours in the day.

Do please look at the previous show, it will save us all lots of time.

Thanks for reading all this, we look forward to hearing from you. sorry if some of it sounds heavy handed, we're just trying to explain things...