As my Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS professor would say... holy business. (Get it? It's funny because the class is about business stuff!)
It's been what some would call "quite a week", what others would call "quite a semester", and what I would call "quite a lifetime", but let's get to an issue in the fandom of late -- respect.
This discussion is spurred on by several events that I've been witness of, and in some cases, party to. If you're a member of the fandom, you almost surely know of one of these events. But my goal here is to talk in broad terms about respect in general, and not about any one particular incident, so let's not resort to any sort of name calling or specific-situation-bringing-uping.
As an artist, you implicitly are part of the community of artists around the world. You should always do your best, when taking any sort of action relating to your position as an artist, to do no harm to the community of artists to which you belong. I feel that the responsibilities you have as an artist can be easily summed up as respect toward a number of different areas.
First off comes respect to your fellow artists. This means understanding that art is hard and takes time, and that anyone who endeavors to make the human experience better by creating art is taking time and effort to do so. The easiest and most common way to violate this respect is to misuse other people's art, most commonly by copy-and-paste or tracing without citation (I would also include referencing an entire image verbatim without citation, as well, but I know this might be contentious). Honestly, I feel like this is a no-brainer, because by failing to disclose the nature of your work, you are essentially taking credit for the work that the other artist did in creating the source that you copied. It's also important to mention that violating this respect can often put us in the realm of copyright infringement.
Next is respect to your viewers. We all have different interpretations of the same things, and we all have different preferences for what we like and don't like. It's perfectly acceptable to voice these opinions, but we can always do so without being disrespectful. This also applies to viewers -- viewers should have respect for the artist's work, even if they don't agree with the premise or if they dislike the work of art. This goes doubly for headcanons and stylistic omissions or additions in art, because these things by their nature are things that cannot be confirmed or denied through canon. And always, always, ALWAYS receive critique with grace and humility. If you get a bit of critique that you disagree with, either respond with caution, respecting their position, or don't respond at all.
Another important issue is respect to your buyers. This is a big one, and manifests in a number of different ways, so I'm going to spend a little extra time on this one. But it's really a simple concept -- if you're selling your art, you have an ethical obligation to ensure that your buyers understand the nature of what you're selling.
Let me tell you a story about watercolor. Watercolors have been around for a long, long time, and they commonly use the same pigments that we see in other media. There's a big difference with watercolor, of course -- in acrylic and oil painting, the pigment is suspended in plastic or oil, respectively, and it gets stuck in place when that medium dries. With watercolor, the binding products don't do very much to protect the pigment, and so the pigments are left more vulnerable to fading effects from light, etc. That said, good watercolor paintings with high quality pigments framed properly have the potential to completely outlast oil paintings (IIRC, there's not enough information to compare to acrylics, since they haven't been around as long).
So why don't we see watercolor paintings in museums and high price auctions nearly as much as we do oil and acrylics? Mainly, it's a misconception that watercolors fade, are impermanent, and not of the archival quality of other media. Where did this misconception come from? It came from a beautiful pigment with a dark secret called alizarin crimson*.
You see, alizarin crimson is a beautiful, dark, somewhat unsaturated red pigment with a blue bias. For years, and continuing to a degree to this day, 'old masters' of watercolors insisted that it was a vital color for every watercolorist's palette. Great alone, and great to make desaturated neutral colors, it had only one problem -- this pigment fades, and fast. In modern tests of pigment stability, alizarin crimson regularly ranks in one of the worst categories of lightfastness, indicating that it would fade considerably in under 20 years under properly controlled conditions. In less controlled conditions, it could start fading in a matter of months. People who purchased these amazing watercolor masterpieces were shocked and disappointed to find that the works that they bought had no longevity, and watercolors got a reputation for being impermanent.
Since then, we've come up with a number of similar pigments to alizarin crimson, and a lot of even BETTER pigments for mixing. These pigments are proven to not even start to noticeably fade for at least 100 years. But so many artists still use the original, and so paint companies still supply it, and so watercolor buyers must still be wary of the fact that the paintings they buy might have been made with impermanent pigments. These artists are not only failing to respect the buyer, but they're also tarnishing the reputation of the artform itself, and diminishing the market value of future watercolors!
I am of the strong opinion that buyers must always be made aware of any factors that may not be completely obvious that may diminish their value of the work. If the work was made with pigments that are known to be fugitive (non-permanent), the buyer should know. If the work was not solely the product of the artist (for example, in cases of tracing), approval must be granted by the original artist, with citation provided to prospective buyers upon request from the original artist. In cases of commissioned work, timelines, expectations, progress, and payment should be as transparent as possible, and all work must be done solely by the artist being commissioned unless agreed to by all parties involved. When selling your work, it's important to understand that the transaction is not adversarial. If they like your work enough to buy it, make sure they understand exactly what they're getting so that they're more inclined to buy from you (and other artists!) again in the future -- and respecting them goes a long, long way towards that.
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Phew! What a wall of text. Sorry for keeping you guys for so long!
In other news (that you may or may not care more about), I've been active-ish on here, but only to monitor my watch list and whatnot, primarily because this latest art hiatus has caught me in a downward swing of art quality again. Hopefully that'll soon change for the better -- I miss the days when I could draw a picture and post it, uncertain of whether or not I thought it was 'good', but with enough confidence that myself and others could recognize improvement in myself. Unfortunately there are projects, finals, and other responsibilities I also have to deal with, so I don't know if I'm really going to have the time to post again in the next few weeks...
I do have a bunch of old pictures in my notebooks that are either referenced directly from other artist's work for practice or that I just never got around to posting because I thought the quality was meh at the time. Let me know if you guys would be at all interested in seeing that stuff, and thanks for sticking around despite my (near constant!) radio silence!
*To be fair, this story is true about a lot of popular, fugitive pigments... but alizarin crimson is perhaps the most well known.