Studio Day

saitolab:

Visualizing scams: passive income 

A scam artist has an employee’s understanding of what it means to be boss. The typical employee thinks that a boss doesn’t really do anything of value. A boss just “manages” things—whatever that is—while the real work is done by employees. What the scam artist wants to do is invert that relationship so that he becomes the boss while everyone else does the work for him. 

The scam artist is therefore attracted to the idea of generating passive income. Passive income means finding sources of income that require only minimal maintenance. Getting royalties from books and pdfs is one kind of passive income. Being a landlord is another. In passive income schemes, the scam artist wants to be at the center of a business in which his properties are hard at work while his primary role is to manage (a little) and reap the rewards.

Visually, this explains the cluttered look of scam sensibilitly. A pay to play gallery is not in the business of selling paintings. It is in the real estate business. The gallery is like an apartment complex and the artists are a constantly shifting group of tenants. The cluttered look comes from the way artists try to maximize their space allotment by fitting in as many works as possible. Pay to play galleries are like the tenements of the art world in the way they encourage high density occupany.

Scam websites also display this cluttered sensibility. A good commercial website helps an audience to develop a meaningful, long-lasting business relationship with a company. A scam website is constantly trying to create income through affiliate marketing, ads, and links to purchase something. You won’t find just one “buy” button on these sites but many, scattered throughout the site, and disguised as links.

Like painters who are attracted to abstract painting because it’s easy (it’s just a matter of brushstrokes and drips), or designers infatuated with Photoshop’s Artistic filters (make ‘fine art’ with just a push of a button), the idea behind many scams is to do the least amount of work to reap the greatest possible reward.

For more on passive income, see this article from Forbes: The Top 4 Reasons Passive Income is a Dangerous Fantasy.

Playing with strait edges

saitolab:

Visualizing scams: contradiction

For artwork expressing imagination, authenticity, and uniqueness, these look a lot like Pollocks.

Sources:

1. Agora gallery, a pay to play gallery: “…these creations speak directly to our own minds, reaching across the gulfs between individuals to set off a spark of imagination and excitement.” [link]

2. Artist as Brand seminar: “Very encouraging to see authenticity ‘in the rough’ as well.” [link]

3. Helen Janow Miqueo: “My Unique Acrylic Pouring Technique™ was influenced by his [Pollock’s] ‘action painting,’ however it is very different. Pollock’s art is created by dripping the painting onto the canvas, I create my art by Pouring Acrylic Paint onto the canvas rather than using a brush.” [link]

4. Kerrie Warren: “‘I don’t feel the need to do as other artists have done before me,’ said Kerrie. ‘I am excited to paint what has not been painted before.’” [link] [paintings]
 

saitolab:

Visualizing scams: bypassing cost

Highly-regarded artists, academics and professionals have pursued their careers at sometimes great personal cost. Cost can mean any number of things: spending years in school; missing your children grow up; failed relationships; enduring tough critiques; giving up significant opportunities; moving across the country to take a position; living in a run-down apartment; giving up a social life; not having a family. In fact, one of the on-going topics at chronicle.com is whether the costs of academic life are too great for the reward [link]. 

Scams won’t tell you about these kinds of costs. What makes pay to play* galleries like Gallery Godo, Agora Gallery, or Art Fusion Gallery scams is not that they are doing anything illegal. It is that they prey on the desire to generate reputation without incurring cost. You’ll see the same idea perpetuated in art consultancy sites as well. For artist-statement.com or authenticpromotion.com™, the only thing that comes between you and the art career you want is an expensive seminar. The problem is never that your work is not good enough. 

Students often think that school is a way to bypass cost. A better way to think of school is as a means to incur productive cost. The goal of an education isn’t to show up every day and do all the work. It’s to be challenged and invite critique—to make gains, and to find out how you fall short. At a university, you will hopefully meet professors and students who are smarter, more creative and more skilled than you. That way, even if you don’t reach your artistic goals, you’ll know why. Most people can live with failure when they can see how they don’t measure up. The problem isn’t having broken dreams: it’s having unrequited ones. 

*Conventional galleries do not charge you to show your work. They make money off sales not artist’s fees.

Four sheets of 120lb Stonehenge ripped down to 30 11”X 15” sheets. Nothing beats a stack of good paper when you want to try something new in the studio.

A few new ideas. After I printed these I realized that most were shot on the iPhone, I rarely use my big camera these days. The two on the upper right were shot with my canon rebel with the wrong light and shutter settings.

Samantha Fields, ArtScene, March 2012

by Marlena Donohue

Imagine how the world looks as you drive in a moderated rain and see your environment through wet glass as you drive relentlessly from the eerie glow of busy streetlights to the quiet darkness of some shrouded woods. That is the way it feels to see the airbrush perfect paintings of Samantha Fields. Fields takes literally thousands of photos of locales – urban, unpeopled – and archives these for later culling to become the subjects of these canvases. “Subject” must be used gingerly here as the manner in which Fields reconstitutes the scenes has the minutest relationship to the L.A. sunsets or the forested spaces in the record. She has mastered pigment so that she achieves these animate, moist surfaces recalling something akin to Renaissance varnishing, but then hides what she depicts in an almost milky veil. The effect is precisely like the world viewed in motion and through liquid. This tension makes for images that hang between things we know and things barely recalled. The paintings are able to call up something so specific and loaded as city lights seen from afar (with all the alienation that urban trope raises in us) and something so generic as the inscrutable constancy of nature; this has been done so much that Fields’ credit is the freshness and believability she can still wrest fro this betwixt-between format and its related speculations (Western Project, Culver City)

saitolab:

Visualizing scams™: relationships vs. things

Productive people value relationships. Finding value primarily in people rather than things, they nurture and maintain long-term associations that are mutually beneficial. Scam artists, on the other hand, value economic production to the exclusion of relationships. For them, the value of a thing eclipses the value of a relationship.

When companies like Disney copyright their work, they are trying to prevent the dilution of value. Knock offs and poor quality products take away from the bottom line but also cheapen the brand which is defined by a vast set of creative, financial, marketing, and distribution relationships. The scam artist, on the other hand, sees value primarily in the thing itself. Scam artists therefore constantly seek to protect, trademark, brand, watermark and copyright their work. 

Critically-acclaimed artists don’t have trademarked slogans. Artists like Thomas Kinkade, the “Painter of Light™, do. Highly-regarded art professionals don’t run trademarked career seminars. The consultants at the smARTist® Telesummit do. Respected galleries don’t cover reproductions of artwork with licensing notices. Boutique galleries like Lassen do. University instructors don’t trademark painting techniques. Online schools like the Virtual Art Academy® (the Building Block™ approach) do. 

Legitimate artists don’t have brands. They have reputations. A reputation speaks to a relationship that extends beyond the world of commerce. A brand is encsconced in economics. Many beginning students inadvertently act like scam artists when they worry that people will steal their work. Having heard the story of how Disney lost the rights to Oswald the Rabbit, they worry about not receiving adequate financial compensation for their characters, designs and other creations. They should instead take the opposite lesson from Disney. After losing Oswald, Disney simply created another character—Mickey Mouse.