yeah, i have to agree about network vs. artwork comment from thefixer.  i never saw anything in the hot 20 i was very impressed by.  and a lot of stuff here does impress me. that is, i saw some skill (but that varied) and very, very little vision or creativity.  frankly, the same is true but more so at artzone, imho.  i've got a huge list of bookmarks of truly great fine artists who are doing incredibly creative work, but just about never in any of the important listings, and their works seem to get few comments.  conversely, i've seen quite mediocre work have 10 or more comments. as much as i think artzone is a nice idea and cool site, it works best for the very popular and gregarious who like to fit one of the various mainstreams. 

if you base merit on anything other than independent judging (a set of judges external to the community), networking and personality have an undue role.  if you take votes from the community, you're going to end up (in general) with the most derivative and least innovative,  the most mainstream and least edgy, the most personality based and least objective results.  not only is it democratic (which means the most median is picked, not the best), but it takes place within an online community.  if all we could do is post pictures and this wasn't actually a community site, then yeah, such things would be a way to see what people thought of the pictures alone.  but it's not.  we all have our very natural reactions to each others' personalities.  if we like someone, we don't want to rank them low or do anything that might hurt them.  if we don't like someone, we're probably not very inclined to go out of our ways to do nice things for them.  that's fine and makes sense, but it doesn't have a thing to do with quality artwork.

if people want a "people's choice" gallery, i think that's fine.  a name like that would make it obvious that it's something of a popularity contest. but if we're going to have a "best of..." gallery, i'd rather have specific judges, preferrably ones with external to the site who only look at artwork.  like retired art directors or someone else with experience, free time to look through the galleries, and a trained eye.