How to Select a Winner Through Showdown

If the term ‘showdown’ conjures up images in your head of bloodthirsty cowboys battling it out to the end, think again. While the Saatchi Gallery’s Showdown feature does involve a certain level of competitiveness, it also seems to be a feature where there are only winners, and no losers.

Showdown is an innovative development in Saatchi’s online presence that allows emerging artists to showcase their works on the website and build their online profiles and portfolios. The Art room is a particularly enticing section where artwork from children of all ages can be viewed. This is one website where the charming squiggles made by a two-year-old can rightly demand their status as art alongside sophisticated and elaborate oils and watercolors by adult artists. An especially innovative feature of this section is that art can be made as well as displayed online.

One of the most alluring and unusual features of the Showdown section is that visitors to the website can vote for each image on a scale of one to ten. Handy links are also available with each image so that visitors can email their favorite images to their friends quickly and easily. Users can also develop a favorites list so that they can store links to images by their favorite artists, and view new work by them. Works that others have recently added to their favorites can also be viewed on the home screen. The popularity of an artist or an image can increase greatly depending on viewers’ perceptions of it. Voting consists of several rounds with individual winners, and an overall winner is chosen at the end.

Artistic Showdown at Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery hosts its artist Showdown as a means of promoting and rewarding artists that demonstrate themselves as possessing extraordinary talent. It is also a means of getting popular opinion on the works of these up-and-coming artists. Over a one-week period, Saatchi accepts one piece of art work from each artist that chooses to enter the contest. Submissions are accepted between 9:00 a.m. on Monday until 6:00 p.m. on the following Sunday. Voting then begins, and each visitor to the site is allowed to rate the quality of each piece of work submitted. Visitors may vote on as many pieces as they wish, but are allotted only one vote for each individual piece. They indicate their preference for a particular work by rating it on a scale of one (1) to ten (10). After the scores are tallied, a duel begins between the two artists who have attained the highest scores. These two leaders vie for a chance to enter the final showdown, where the winners of twelve such rounds go head to head for the final prize of £1000 for the winner and £750 for the runner up.

Entrance into this event on the Saatchi website Showdown is free and easy, and it holds the promise of furthering the careers of not just the talented winners but also of the wide variety of talented entrants whose works will be seen by Saatchi’s large viewing audience.The competition is also a means of exposing young artists to the triumphs and pitfalls that are likely to attend them throughout their entire artistic career. Therefore, artists not only get the chance to benefit monetarily, but also the chance to develop as a professional businessperson.