Forum - View topicNEWS: Otakon Acknowledges Artist Alley Controversy
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| samuelp Posts: 788 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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Well if the anecdotes i hear are true, most AA slots are filled by whichever person is refreshing the registration page fast enough to get in the form before the slots fill up. The point of an artists alley isn't to have a dealer's room for semi-pro traveling artists that fly around to multiple cons every year, it's to give a chance for people to interact with small time artists and local talent. Well, I look at it like this: There was a festival every year in the town my parent's live in in virginia called the Herndon festival. One of the 1000s of small town fairs that happen everywhere. And at this fair there were always a 50 or so booths filled with arts and crafts makers, etc... But I quickly realized that almost all of these people simply go around to every small town fair on the east coast... only one or two of the booths were people that actually lived anywhere near the town at all. It all seemed artificial and disheartening. I don't want to see artists alley's filling up with people who do the whole "con circuit" every year and turn the thing into some kind of well oiled operation. All the current systems of first-come-first serve registration serves is to let the most "pro" artists scoop up the spots before anyone else. (Or in the case at hand, the most "con" artist.... haha!) |
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hikaru004 Posts: 1833 |
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| But these artists are semi-pros. One artist alley participant at another con had an art show and owns a small business for his work and works another job to pay the bills. These people are at the cons to make an income. Just like the dealers in the Dealer room.
The days of the amateurs have prob long since gone. Increasing the limit to 4 tables per group with more than 1 location per table might solve the problem. But 14 tables was going overboard. |
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| nargun Posts: 157 |
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What's the "problem" that you're fixing here? Yes, there's demand for more space than is availible, but what you're suggesting only makes the situation worse. From the perspective of the artists, there's a huge benefit from getting space at all and a steadilly-decreasing additional benefit for each extra table. From the perspective of the attendees, the benefit is pretty much linear with numbers of artists, or at least falls away much slower. Ratios work out that the best tradeoff occurs when the spaces are quite small; giving one artist more than the minimum only improves the situation if you can do that without excluding another artist. [this is for artists, who are dealing in art, a fairly compact good. For commercial traders, the stock they're trading in is very different, and so the display requirements are too, which means you get different numbers; one of the reasons conventions often handle the two seperately. Yes, I have run staff at cons, although only smallish ones by US standards. If space is as tight as it looks to be here, I'd probably ballot tables...] |
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| hikaru004 Posts: 1833 |
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| Otakon is in Baltimore, MD so there shouldn't be a space issue unless there is a huge demand. The issue is if the artists are using fake ids to get tables then there may not be enough tables being dished out to the artists for them to make a profit for being there. People do travel in, stay at hotels with an artist alley discount hopefully blah, blah..but they have to make enough money to cover expenses and make a profit.
Maybe Otakon should treat artist alley as a business too. When you think about it, the artists are small businesses. Did the artists feel like they could use another table beyond what was given to them or have a satellite location in a different part of Artist Alley to capture more traffic this year? |
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| fighterholic Posts: 9194 |
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| People are able to figure out how to break the rules and still get away with what they do, so it depends on how everybody else is able to crack down on the business. It's an irritating and consuming ordeal, but only by knowing who they are when they try to do stuff can they really be stopped. | ||||
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Seca Posts: 92 Location: Saitama, Japan |
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If you want to know what the allegations are I suggest you read this post on DA as it's pretty informative about the whole event. I have a friend who makes her living by her art and going to cons are a part of how she sells her work. And it's not only to just sell her art but as a chance to meet up with other artists and the fans of her work. And whether or not she gets a table to sell plays a big part on which cons she will go to and I'm sure it's the same for many other artists. So the idea of a group hogging so many tables that other artists could have had ticks me off. |
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| Dan42 Chief Encyclopedist  Posts: 2080 Location: Tokyo |
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| Solving the problem with rules is pointless; people will simply break the rules if it's beneficial to them. You need a system whose dynamics are such that they ensure one table per artist.
Here's what I propose: Instead of a first-come first-served system, allocate tables based on a simple competition. Each artist can submit as many works as s/he wants, then those works are rated (by random people or by hand-picked people) and then artists are ranked by the SUM of the ratings for their works and the N top-ranked artists get the N available tables. This means that to maximize their chance to get in, they have to submit all their works under the same name in order to get the highest possible aggregate score. And then you just need to require that they present the original works at the convention to ensure they match the works used in the contest (i.e. they didn't "borrow" the works of others to rank well) |
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| Ceru Posts: 44 |
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This "solution" has been proposed several times by various people (congoers and artists alike) but it would just NEVER WORK. The same 40 amazing, brilliant artists would be at every single con (thus becoming boring to people attending multiple Artist Alleys) while those who are decent artists but still trying to get better at what they do (such as myself) would always get shafted. The first come first serve system isn't perfect, but at least it's not a popularity contest. Heck, if it was, the Ramy character who took all the tables would get a table yet again because for some reason he's hugely popular. The only real solution I can propose to the mess, in terms of future cons, is mildly similar to what you proposed. When someone registers, they HAVE to present a link to their work. It doesn't matter if it's DA or LJ or heck a single Tripod page with a bunch of their stuff on it. That way people like Ramys friends (who I'm assuming aren't artists themselves) would be unable to just copy and paste his URL again. And people like Ramy would have only 1 chance. *sigh* The whole thing is just pathetic really but it will be interesting to see what will happen to the cheaters when they go to AWA. Most of the fanart-drawing community on DA are well aware of them, and I'd imagine that most of the people selling alongside them would as well. I pity the pour soul who gets stuck sitting next to one of his tables. Even if he hadn't cheated the system, he and his gf (who was also in on the plot) reportedly hassled passerbys to buy stuff. Ew. |
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marie-antoinette Posts: 2626 Location: Toronto |
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Even then, it's not like it's hard to make a website. As has been said, any rule that is made can be broken. I would say the only solution would be to have some penalty in place for people caught breaking rules such as these, ie clearly stating that anyone doing this would be immediately removed from the AA and from the convention as a whole. Then the only problem you have to face is proving that the rules were indeed broken. This makes me feel glad that the con I help run is a small one. You can't get away with things like this when there are only a limited number of tables to begin with (and as for the person who said space shouldn't be an issue because it's in Baltimore...that's insane. If space wasn't an issue, then the AA wouldn't be filled up within 30 minutes of registration opening. There is always a finite number of spots available, no matter where it is). |
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| samuelp Posts: 788 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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| I have a workable idea.... But it would take some pretty large organization.
What if a group of artists starts up a non-profit organization (nationwide) whose purpose is primarily to keep track of who shows up to what artists alleys, give artists advice and support, and generally register people to keep some sort of track of them. Then, any convention can ask this organization to deal with the registration for its artists alley and not have to deal with the problems individually. Since anyone who wants to participate would have to sign up with this group (maybe for a small yearly fee or something to help pay for administration), then it gives the body the power to help distribute artists around the cons in a fair manner, and helps to keep down on fraud because they are focused only on this one task. As it is now every con has a different process and different rules, so something like this would make the artists lives a lot easier by unifying the process. Of course the local cons would be in charge of the event itself, just not the registration process. Also, in this case anyone breaking the rules would face a lot worse of a penalty than being banned from a single con... They could be blacklisted from the majority of cons all at once. |
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| Dan42 Chief Encyclopedist Posts: 2080 Location: Tokyo |
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What do you consider the purpose of Artist Alley? Me, I kinda thought it was to showcase amazing, brilliant artists. If the same 40 brilliant people apply at every con and win every time, then in my book it means they *deserve* to be at every con. Of course, the contest has to be set up so it's a quality contest, not a popularity contest. But if you think that the purpose of Artist Alley is to showcase not-so-brilliant-but-might-become-brilliant-someday artists, you are probably right. |
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| marie-antoinette Posts: 2626 Location: Toronto |
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I think the point would be to show a variety of artists, and that would not be served by seeing the same group over and over. And it's really hard (I personally would say impossible) to really judge art it a way that would be fair to everyone. The only real fair way, IMO, is the first come, first served method that is already in place. Yes, it gets abused, but so could the other method as well, VERY easily. |
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| Darkcat Posts: 1 |
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| I have 2 prints and 2 chibi bookmarks(for free in the deal) from one of tables in question. I'm very selective about the art I get from Artist alley and it saddens me that this act of space hogging is going to tinge my appreciation of those prints.
I tend to buy prints of favorite characters in situations you won't see in the shows, like cosplaying as another set of characters or future versions of those characters, and familiar characters in vastly different styles. I think this will push me more to look for totally original character work. |
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| hikaru004 Posts: 1833 |
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Okay, this was what was actually said.
Accurate quoting of other people's statement is always a nice thing to do. Baltimore should have been able to accomodate with a larger area if Otakon was willing to pay more money. |
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| hikaru004 Posts: 1833 |
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Except that probably not too many people would care. Business is business. Capitalism thrives on creating profit from a loophole. 
It's probably been done before and only came to head because of the table count. I like Dan42's suggestion the best. I would modifiy it as the top 20 would go to the Dealer's Room with all the benefits of being a vendor (discount on lodging for example) and publicity for being a winner and let the others slug it out in Artist's Alley. I think that Ramy should be put in the Dealer's Room. Last edited by hikaru004 on Sun Aug 31, 2008 2:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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