i really appreciate you for being so outspoken about the unethical practices fandom artists engage in. i’m from a south asian country where abuse of garments workers is extremely prevalent. before my mother remarried and we moved to the US, she worked in a factory that supplied to Target and it saddens me how americans are so willfully blind to the abuses they face. i actually never realized how commonplace it is for small fandom artists here to engage in these practices until recently i started having enough money to go to cons. even then, i initially thought everything was made by the artist themselves. so i really appreciate you taking a strong stance, especially as a western artist. i hope artist alleys have a brighter future!
yeah this is something i've really come around on just in the last few years. unfortunately it's just something that's incredibly easy to not think about too hard, especially when you're really in deep in those kind of artist spaces where like. the prevailing belief system underpinning the standard practices is that the deck is so far stacked against independent artists trying to make a living that anything you do to bring up your bottom line is justified, insofar as it is being done with your own artwork. and nothing about the difficulty and insecurity of being a working artist is exaggerated either! so the kneejerk response to be defensive to critiques of your business practices is one i understand even if i am no longer sympathetic towards it.
for me a big part of how i think about these sorts of things is. i know i'm never going to be any kind of political activist. i'm just not really a stable, confident, or educated enough person to functionally be in that position and don't see that changing any time in the near future. choosing where my money goes is pretty much one of the only avenues i have to actually live by the principles i claim to hold. so if i am going to genuinely believe that it's wrong to profit off of the underpaid labor of foreign workers in unsafe conditions, then i need to not use my money to have foreign workers in unsafe conditions do underpaid labor for me. that is the bare minimum.
you would hope that all of the labor concerns artists and other creative workers are currently experiencing regarding AI would result in them trying to develop solidarity with other groups' pre-existing labor concerns, but it seems for the most part that that's not the case. instead, it seems as if the most vocal and prevalent cohort of independent artists is closing rank, becoming even less receptive to scrutiny of their practices now that they feel the very essence of art itself is on the line. everything has been retroactively legitimized by the introduction of an existential threat to their way of life.
i think its not likely artist alleys themselves will improve, but i think instead we're going to see a split between the people who are okay staying the course on artist as Small Business Owner with all the baggage that entails, and those who find we can not maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary for that. It feels like the covid years signed the death warrant for Fandom as subculture and now it's just the culture. which means it's about time for the new subculture to splinter off. i think the divide between people who enjoy the legitimacy that comes from the mainstream commercialization of these previously niche transformative spaces and those who are detested by it instead is where that splintering will originate from.
a bit of a tangential aside, but relevant enough to feel worth mentioning. when i got my copy of the @/rftazine i was super pleasantly surprised to see that the zine shipped with a page of info about how to properly dispose of the (recyclable!) packaging and a list of the manufacturers used for the project. not only do i find this kind of transparency beneficial for everyone involved, i think that prompting people who purchase these sorts of things to think about where it all came from before they got it, and where it's all going to end up afterwards, is a necessary first step in any kind of collective reckoning with the ethics of indie merch production. i hope to see more people take this step with their projects!
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