He listened to everything and then asked if he knew the members of the jury when he took the exam, and if he knew, would he take the exam? He said they kept it a secret, but he would never take the exam, because his life was full of grudges, like with judge C, who had a huge argument over how to judge fairly, or judge D, who hated him because he wrote on Facebook criticizing his aesthetic taste. He laughed: Then why are you upset, in this life everything has cause and effect. Especially in the art world, how many people can stand each other? If you criticize someone, you can hate them for a month, if you hate someone, you hold it in and wait for an opportunity, so like the writer Nguyen Khai once said, works and people are sometimes like mirrors and rags.
The brighter the mirror (i.e. the work), the dirtier the rag. Moreover, judges have their own troubles, always under pressure from the press, public opinion and all sorts of other things. Many years ago, the director who was the head of the jury once declared loudly: When judging, we are not under pressure from the author's name, the press, public opinion, but all that matters is the quality of the work. After that, he and the entire jury were "stoned" for choosing a film with a touristic theme, while the artistic content was very little.
But sitting in the judge's chair is really brain-damaging, sometimes you have to look ahead and behind, lest you judge the "guy" in the middle and offend the "two" on either side. Sometimes you have to calculate like playing chess, to make the whole village happy a little. If someone runs too fast, sometimes you have to pull them back so that the team behind doesn't get lost, and they end up alone.
The young man sat there listening silently and then asked: So there is never any justice, uncle? The old man laughed heartily: Yes, but it is only relative justice. But nothing in this life is absolute.
He hummed and muttered: I still have to compete abroad, uncle. Overseas, they are more fair. He laughed again: Even over there, things are not always fair. After all, the purpose of an artist's work is not just to compete, but to satisfy his creative desire, to express his personal voice.
