![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the AA, ZF, and... you!
Oct. 4th, 2010 12:30 pmyes, Alcoholics Anonymous! No, wait, Artists Alley. I got a PM on the AWA board this weekend from somebody concerned about the tone being taken in a gigantic thread about the recent convention's artists alley. The thread has since been locked and vanished into the Negative Zone, but before it got gone I dug through it some to see if it warranted my attention. And it really didn't; what was done is what I would have done. They are quick on the trigger on the AWA message board.
And really, as I explained to the person who PM'ed me, I don't know enough about AA culture to make any honest decisions about anything relating to it, other than "knock off being a dick". The artists alley has turned into its own culture that has moved way away from where it was the last time I held down a table there.
I mean, during my time in AA, (I'm talking 1992-2002, intermittent) the tables were ten or fifteen tables slapped down wherever there was space - outside the dealers room, in front of registration, generally in unsecured high-traffic areas. Artists were mixed in with convention publicity tables, small press publishers selling zines, minicomics publishers selling their minis, and anybody else who could talk the convention into giving them a table. I fit into all those categories. There weren't a lot of rules and if you brought a bunch of junk from home that you wanted to get rid of and sold it, nobody got on your case.
The AA now is a completely different beast. It is full of professional looking booths with signage and giant prints and displays. The level of quality in the artwork has taken a giant leap forward (right alongside the giant leap in things like Photoshop, haw haw) and most artists have achieved a certain level of slick, appealing, van-art kitsch that would not be out of place in any suburban youth culture store. The craft quotient has risen and there's an increase in hats, shirts, costume jewellery, candy, and other hand-made items. The days when it was just a bunch of people sketching and selling zines is over, dead, and buried.
Now all you need to do is to check out the rules portion of any anime con's website to see how much the Artists Alley culture has changed. It's serious business now. In particular is the rule about how only a certain percentage of work on your table can be fan art. Right now at AWA the ratio is 80-20 - only 20% of work on your table can be fan art of copyrighted characters.
Now, I can completely understand the rationale for this rule: anime cons are becoming increasingly connected to the copyright holders and want to limit infringement. But I think there's another reason for this rule, and it's that when you're holding down a table full of drawings of your own original characters and not making any sales, and you're watching the table next to yours sell piece after piece of fanart of Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Naruto, Card Captors, Tenchi characters, you start to get annoyed and jealous and pissed off. You're doing your original work that you spent time and work on, are emotionally invested in, and it's being ignored in favor of an appeal to the lowest common denominator. I've been there and I understand those emotions completely.
I can't help but think that the fanart ratio rule is in place because of those feelings. It's an attempt to level the playing field, to reshape the market into something with higher aspirations than a room filled with bare-titty Dirty Pair airbrush T-shirts. And in principle that's a good thing.
None of the artists are really complaining about that rule. The artists spend a lot of time accusing other artists of breaking the rule (which is most of what made the AWA thread go on for 8 pages), but for the most part the artists are OK with it.
What the artists AREN'T okay with are poor sales. And if you know anybody who ever has any kind of table at a convention, they are NEVER happy with their sales. The AA has all sorts of reasons their sales are down - the room's too big, the room's hard to find, the table layouts are weird, those other assholes are selling too much fan art. And this is another reason that thread went on 8 pages.
Some of the artists were talking about how they are trying to make a living out of selling art at Artists Alleys. Now there's some wishful thinking. It's not impossible to make a living selling prints at shows - but you need to hit all the arts and crafts festivals in all the fairgrounds and city parks in America, you need to make the same circuit the folk artists and the landscape painters and the caricaturists do. Not anime cons.
Nobody addressed the fact that America is still in a recession and that people have a lot less folding money to spend on artwork. Nobody was pointing out that the AA this year was 20,000 square feet of full color glossy booths selling full color glossy fan art at full color glossy prices, to customers whose wallets had already survived the SHFS on Friday and the giant dealers room right next door.
And the kicker - none of the artists were pointing out that Joe Average Anime Con AA Customer thinks of the Artists Alley as a place to buy fan art. In his mind the two are inextricably linked. So we have two opposing forces coming into play - the artists want to sell their original work, but the customers want to buy fan art of their favorite characters. And as long as these two mindsets are in conflict we're going to see sparks.
And let's keep in mind that my appraisal of the situation is that of almost complete ignorance - I got to hit the AA this year for the first time in a while, and my knowledge of the issues involved comes from the anime con message board, which since the dawn of time has been the primary arena for gigantic flaming piles of drama to erupt after every single anime con artists alley ever.
So I don't really have any solutions, and I don't know enough about things to even formulate a solution, and that's what I told the person in the PM. That's right world, somebody willing to say, "I don't know."
Speaking of artwork - new ZERO FIGHTER this week!! Page 74 already. It's like I've been doing this every week or something.
And really, as I explained to the person who PM'ed me, I don't know enough about AA culture to make any honest decisions about anything relating to it, other than "knock off being a dick". The artists alley has turned into its own culture that has moved way away from where it was the last time I held down a table there.
I mean, during my time in AA, (I'm talking 1992-2002, intermittent) the tables were ten or fifteen tables slapped down wherever there was space - outside the dealers room, in front of registration, generally in unsecured high-traffic areas. Artists were mixed in with convention publicity tables, small press publishers selling zines, minicomics publishers selling their minis, and anybody else who could talk the convention into giving them a table. I fit into all those categories. There weren't a lot of rules and if you brought a bunch of junk from home that you wanted to get rid of and sold it, nobody got on your case.
The AA now is a completely different beast. It is full of professional looking booths with signage and giant prints and displays. The level of quality in the artwork has taken a giant leap forward (right alongside the giant leap in things like Photoshop, haw haw) and most artists have achieved a certain level of slick, appealing, van-art kitsch that would not be out of place in any suburban youth culture store. The craft quotient has risen and there's an increase in hats, shirts, costume jewellery, candy, and other hand-made items. The days when it was just a bunch of people sketching and selling zines is over, dead, and buried.
Now all you need to do is to check out the rules portion of any anime con's website to see how much the Artists Alley culture has changed. It's serious business now. In particular is the rule about how only a certain percentage of work on your table can be fan art. Right now at AWA the ratio is 80-20 - only 20% of work on your table can be fan art of copyrighted characters.
Now, I can completely understand the rationale for this rule: anime cons are becoming increasingly connected to the copyright holders and want to limit infringement. But I think there's another reason for this rule, and it's that when you're holding down a table full of drawings of your own original characters and not making any sales, and you're watching the table next to yours sell piece after piece of fanart of Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Naruto, Card Captors, Tenchi characters, you start to get annoyed and jealous and pissed off. You're doing your original work that you spent time and work on, are emotionally invested in, and it's being ignored in favor of an appeal to the lowest common denominator. I've been there and I understand those emotions completely.
I can't help but think that the fanart ratio rule is in place because of those feelings. It's an attempt to level the playing field, to reshape the market into something with higher aspirations than a room filled with bare-titty Dirty Pair airbrush T-shirts. And in principle that's a good thing.
None of the artists are really complaining about that rule. The artists spend a lot of time accusing other artists of breaking the rule (which is most of what made the AWA thread go on for 8 pages), but for the most part the artists are OK with it.
What the artists AREN'T okay with are poor sales. And if you know anybody who ever has any kind of table at a convention, they are NEVER happy with their sales. The AA has all sorts of reasons their sales are down - the room's too big, the room's hard to find, the table layouts are weird, those other assholes are selling too much fan art. And this is another reason that thread went on 8 pages.
Some of the artists were talking about how they are trying to make a living out of selling art at Artists Alleys. Now there's some wishful thinking. It's not impossible to make a living selling prints at shows - but you need to hit all the arts and crafts festivals in all the fairgrounds and city parks in America, you need to make the same circuit the folk artists and the landscape painters and the caricaturists do. Not anime cons.
Nobody addressed the fact that America is still in a recession and that people have a lot less folding money to spend on artwork. Nobody was pointing out that the AA this year was 20,000 square feet of full color glossy booths selling full color glossy fan art at full color glossy prices, to customers whose wallets had already survived the SHFS on Friday and the giant dealers room right next door.
And the kicker - none of the artists were pointing out that Joe Average Anime Con AA Customer thinks of the Artists Alley as a place to buy fan art. In his mind the two are inextricably linked. So we have two opposing forces coming into play - the artists want to sell their original work, but the customers want to buy fan art of their favorite characters. And as long as these two mindsets are in conflict we're going to see sparks.
And let's keep in mind that my appraisal of the situation is that of almost complete ignorance - I got to hit the AA this year for the first time in a while, and my knowledge of the issues involved comes from the anime con message board, which since the dawn of time has been the primary arena for gigantic flaming piles of drama to erupt after every single anime con artists alley ever.
So I don't really have any solutions, and I don't know enough about things to even formulate a solution, and that's what I told the person in the PM. That's right world, somebody willing to say, "I don't know."
Speaking of artwork - new ZERO FIGHTER this week!! Page 74 already. It's like I've been doing this every week or something.
