There are a couple of misconceptions about registration fees floating out there. ArtPrize has a $50 fee for artists and $100 fee for venues to register.

Misconception 1: The fees pay for the prize money

I’m not sure where this started, but I’ve heard it from a few artists. There is a total of $449,000 in prize money that will go to the top 10 finalists for ArtPrize. Some people have been watching to see how many artists and venues sign up to see if it will reach $449,000. The thought being, if not enough artists and venues register, the prize money will drop.

This is not true. The prize money is secure. It is a donation from the DeVos family and was in place the day Rick DeVos announced the idea for ArtPrize on April 23.

Where does the registration fee go? It helps to offset the costs of things like having a full-time artist relations manager or volunteer coordinator doing things like finding places for artists to stay for cheap or for free. The expense of putting on the event and building the website easily eclipses the registration fee revenue, which is where donors step in.

Misconception 2: The fee guarantees a spot in a venue

Some artists paid the $50 registration fee believing that was the only step to securing space within a venue. At a film festival like Sundance, the registration fee does not mean your film will be shown. Over 6,000 filmmakers register each year with only 250 slots to fill (short films pay $50, feature films $75). However, maybe this idea spread because of ArtPrize’s unusual entry process.

There is no official ArtPrize curator or jury selecting artists. It’s unusual, but does not mean artists enter on a pay-to-play basis. It just means selecting art work is totally decentralized and spread out over a hundred venues with wildly divergent tastes and experience. (In a strange twist, I’ve heard that one or two venues are solely accepting artists based on a rental fee, which is a variation on pay-to-play with a dash of pure capitalism.)

For anyone still bristling at the registration fee, let’s crunch the numbers.

Say 10 artists a day secure venues for the next 25 days—the average daily rate of the last two weeks—until the August 15 deadline. 250 artists plus the 222 secured at the time of this post makes 472 total. Let’s make it a more conservative number: 400.

Now, say 1,600 artists who began registration finish and pay the registration fee by July 31 (a huge increase from our current daily average).

Based on a high estimate of artists who complete registration and a low estimate of artists that secure a venue, ArtPrize artists have a 1-in-4 chance of showing their work. (Actual numbers will probably be closer to 1-in-3.)

A filmmaker paying the registration fee for Sundance: 1-in-24 chance.

Certainly, Sundance is 30 years old and well established. But, purely from an investment point of view, out of the events operating on the scale of ArtPrize, a 1-in-4 or 1-in-3 chance of getting a return on your registation fee is not so bad.