Artists live in a battlefield. (Not to trivialize what real soldiers do to protect our country and others around the world.) Artists engage in hand-to-hand, mind-to-mind combat with people who seem to think of us as aliens, oddities, curiosities, foreigners, exotics, barbarians (historical for foreigner), and even invisible. Think of the latter as racism, but it could be anti-female and others, too!
"Double Paradox" Joyce Owens
This is a second post about what people call artists. We can't get identified accurately by people who should know, whether using the description "artist" too broadly or this: I engaged in a little tiff recently with a Chicago design TV show that first, did not identify the art work that was shown on the segment, then proceeded to "reproduce" the abstract painting at a party art place, intimating a facsimile of the art was good enough and easy enough to replicate since it was an abstract. It was the old "my 5 year old could do THAT" syndrome! I did get the show to acknowlege the artist, saying they had meant to. But they still felt their facsimile, though not as good, was sufficent.
I notice over and over that art is used on sets in movies, on TV shows, in magazines, and the artists art not identified. The chair designer may be named, but the art seems the same as the wallpaper (no offense to wall paper designers). OK, if the art is not prominent, no need to single it out, but when you do a whole segment on the painting please don't "forget" to mention the artist, the title of the art, and link to their website.
My other observation over the years that pisses me off more than a mere pet peeve is that artists who live in a city are referred to as "local". You know like the local drug store or the local grocery store. What does "local" connotate that makes me bring up this reality? The local store serves that limited community, even if it is a chain, you will find items that suit the locale. An artist who lives in Hyde Park, for example, may serve the local community but may also have an international reach. Chicago has a wealth of artists who are known nationally and internationally and with the advent of the Internet, almost no artist is relegated to the local-only status! It is an assumption by a writer or commenter who is not aware of the artist's reach. So they say "local" artist rather than Chicago-based artist, New York-based, or Peoria-based, etc. , which is not the same. Local implies pedestrian, confined to one space. Going out of the local neighborhood I check for definitions that include being restricted to an area...
I like accuracy. Sometimes we get things worng accidentally. But if we just try to tell the truth and show respect, we will be OK.
