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There is a similar entity for visual art, the juried exhibition or juried publication. Submissions are invited, which are reviewed by a jury of artists, and the best are invited to be in a gallery show, or a publication.

But you have to pay a flat fee that covers the cost of the process. And this flat fee can be way more than it actually costs to review work -- it's basically profit-taking by whoever is putting on the show.

And further, you have no real reason to believe that your work was actually seen. The jury could have just tossed it out and selected works from their 12 friends. These shows are generally regarded with great suspicion, but still, artists pay to be included. (http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2012/01/when-do-you-stop-e...)

Film festivals have long worked that way as well. The maker of a short film can easily spend $1000 on jury fees at random festivals, trying to get his work seen.

Years ago I watched a friend desperately trying to get her work seen by someone -- an animated film that took two years to make. It wasn't picked up by festivals and the admissions were breaking her meagre budget, but she felt she had to keep trying because there was no other outlet. That the film wasn't picked didn't seem to be a reflection on the quality considering the other choices.

I don't know how much film festivals have changed in the YouTube era. I hope the organizers' profit model has been disrupted to oblivion by now, since anyone with a projector can easily show anything from the Internet -- access to content is not an exclusive thing anymore.

So a bunch of "bigots, homophobes and sexists" decided that certain cliques in poetry were cashing in prizes and reviews with controlling the narrative?

Where was Gawker and The Guardian when we needed them!

Jokes aside, there is something like this today http://deepfreeze.it but it's run by "bigots, homophobes, sexists and obviously racists".

I immediately thought of deepfreeze upon seeing this article - you'll notice that the people that it's cataloguing the misbehavior of are the ones that scream the loudest about its tone or the distastefulness of the people running it or associated with it, with precious little to say about the facts.

At least in DF's case, there's a reason for that. Most of everything you'll find there are of the form "X did Y" with a direct link to an archive where X was documented doing Y.. it's pretty hard to argue "I never said that!" when someone's got a third party link to you saying that.

As far as proof goes, they've got a higher evidentiary standard than Wikipedia, something that many trust without question.