ode to the admins - Blake Prize

the blake prize logo

Entries for the Blake Prize has officially closed on 27th of July, we have received around 1500 entries (not sure if it's an outrageous number but we're quiet proud of it)
we started processing the entries and preparing them for the judges to view before August 27th

Before the entry deadline days at the office was quiet mellow and routine, we processed the entries that we received, Stefanie (our amazing manager who runs the whole thing from her home) processes the payments and we the interns would re-size the images of the artwork in which the artist submitted. Sounds easy enough, but these task really makes one appreciate administrative work and draw to the fact that how much it is overlooked.
It's like admiring your beloved iphone for how great a job those geniuses of an scientist/ engineer at apple have achieved but overlooking the workers who welds those tiny parts together on the production line. It's an easy job, anybody with delicate hands can do it, but without them there is no way the product would come into being.

People often take administrative work for granted, since it's often seen as repetitive, data entry jobs that needs not much creativity, which is 80% true.
But we often forget to put people in the equation, people who come from all walks of life from different background, different culture, different temperate, different names different accent different understanding of the same instructions, and it complicates things a hell lot.


People amaze you
often in many different ways

Since our entries are posted (very oldschool, I know) though most entries we received are very standard and fitting to our instructions, there's sometimes gems buried in the piles. There's entries that have beautifully written artist statement, one even had a special thank you note with hand drawn flowers and little people on it.
The problem with these beautiful handwritten statements is....it's really hard for us to make out what they are trying to say most of the time...
Once an artists called to insist that he wants to take a picture of his photography and post it to us because he's scared somebody would steal his work and reproduce it, we spend quiet a bit of time trying to explain to him if he posted the picture to us we still have to scan the picture, we will still get a copy of his work and the resolution won't be as good and puts him in a compromising position during judging. Not sure if he fully understood us, since we still received an entry of a picture of a photography, I wonder if it was the same person......?

I know it seems like very trivial issues and petty complaints, all I wanted to say is working at the Blake and at the National Palace Museum as well since my main task there was very admin based, helping with the three day seminar that we were putting on, processing applications and payments.
 

Next time be nicer to our local officers and school admins
(I need to work on that too)