International Art Contest

The first International Art Contest was founded in 1998 by ArtistScope (formerly ArtDept Pty Ltd). The ArtDept contest was most unique in that it was not only the first art contest open to artists from every country around the world, but it was judged by the artists themselves.

Prior to the International Art Contest all other contests had been limited to local artists and judged by a single person who was usually the gallery owner or promoter, and judging from those results, were obviously not free of bias. But what better solution, especially when considering that the art is being contributed from beyond boundaries, that the winners be decided by the artists themselves.

1998 International Art Contest

The 1998 art contest was well received and featured in major news services worldwide. Substantial prize money was offered with a requirement that winnining entries be prepared to ship to Sydney for an art show. An online voting system was developed and opened to the public to encourage audience participation.

The Following Years

Some changes were made for the following art contests. First up the prize money was removed with no notable impact on enthusiasm and the number of entries. This being an Art Contest of International repute and the selection of winners beyond question, the artists welcomed the exposure and the winners gained fame in their national news outlets. The categories were increased to include Realism, Modern, Mixed (sculpture) and Digital art.

The International Art Contest ran for 10 consecutive years from 1998-2007 until the domain for artdept.com.au was hijacked from inside the registry. It was later bought back but by then it had lost reputation and traffic due to the scamvertising.

In 2012 the International Art Contest was relaunched with a new site at international-art-contest.com but the contest didn't survive until its closing date due to server failure. Although all of ArtistScope's web sites are hosted on dedicated servers, this one had multiple hard drives in a Raid array. Having multiple drives fail at the same time is unheard of but it happened. The loss of data, not only for the art contest, but for all sites on that server was disastrous. By the time client sites were restored there was no more enthusiasm.

To this day, while others have been hosting events as "International Art Contests" they are judged by people with hidden agendas. William Kent and ArtistScope managed, liaised, sponsored and hosted this event throughout its history.

International Art Contest Winners

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