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I have talked to many local artists who are very bitter about the Austin Museum of Art moving the Austin Fine Art Festival (now called Art City Austin) from Laguna Gloria to downtown and using zapplication.org for the application process. When they did that, they cut out a lot of local artists who had been doing Laguna Gloria for years. It appears that AMOA's philosophy is to attract artists from anywhere but Austin.

I recently heard a really sad story. An Austin couple who were both artists would work all year creating art (sculpture, paintings) that they would sell at the annual Laguna Gloria show. They made the majority of their income at that show for many years. They were rejected by zapplication, and had to quit being artists and take minimum wage jobs to survive. The husband passed away not long afterward. His wife, now retirement age is destitute. What a shame this process is ruining lives.

I applied in 2006, entering my sea life paintings, and got turned down. Every year since then, I get emails from AMOA inviting me to apply through zapplication. After getting turned down the first time, I started responding to their emails asking why I would consider wasting $30 when I knew that a local artist has little chance of getting in and that everybody knows that they limit the number of local artists they allow. They emailed me back denying that they limit local artists, claiming that the rumor was causing local artists not to apply and that they were working on trying to win them back. For the next couple of years, I visited the festival and counted how many local artists there were. The number has increased to about 25% of the show, so I thought maybe they are starting to listen, but I was wrong.

I started hearing rumors that the local artists that do get in have to volunteer and get to know the directors and get "sponsored". I was able to validate that information when I had a woman come into my booth at an art show recently and tell me she was about to do her first art show, and asked questions about where I got my tent and display panels. I asked her where her first show was going to be and she said Art City Austin. Well there was still about 2 weeks left before the entry deadline, so I asked her how she knew she had gotten in since the winners hadn't been announced yet. She said she was being sponsored by the board of directors! I fail to see how this method of determining who gets in is fair to the artists who pay the $35 non-refundable jury fee. The jury process is supposed to be impartial right? Well, it's obviously not.

I later applied to the Laguna Gloria Holiday Art Festival, another AMOA event, and got accepted (they don't use zapplication but have the same $30 jury fee plus $300 to exhibit). This time I entered both sea life and florals. I got a letter back from them saying that I had been accepted but that "the jury preferred my floral paintings over the sea life and to keep that in mind when preparing for the show". Imagine that! I wrote them a letter in response saying sorry, but my sea life paintings outsell my florals by about five to one, and since I am there to make money, I will be showing my sea life paintings, and if that's a problem, give me a refund and I'll gladly bow out. I never heard back from them. I did the show and did really, really well (sold 80% sea life and 20% florals), so I applied again the next year, but swore that if they turned me down that would be the last time AMOA got any of my money. Well, the jury didn't think award winning paintings of marine life that are in several galleries and selling like hotcakes are good enough for their show, or didn't like my letter and turned me down. Not a penny more from me for non-refundable jury fees, zapplication and AMOA!

Oh, yeah and, at the 2007 festival, AMOA's finance and operations director was caught and arrested for going into an artist's tent at the show after hours and attempting to steal her paintings - Click here for the story and here for a follow up story.

Anyone in the entire world can apply through Zapplication, that's part of the reason it makes it hard for local artists to get in. AMOA should do the right thing and set aside half of the booths for Texas artists and stop using the "old boy" system to decide who gets in. I have heard some of the shows that go through zapplication get as many as 1000 to 2000 applications per show. Do the math. I did a little research, and AMOA received over 700 applications last year. That's over $20,000 in jury fees alone, and they get $350 on top of that for each exhibiting artist. Since only about 200 artists get in, they took money in the sum of $14,000 from artists who didn't get in! AMOA is exploiting artists to fund their art museum. They could care less whether or not the city's artists make any money.

Update: As of October, 2008 zapplication has raised its jury fee to $35 and Art City Austin has raised its booth fee to $495.

Check out what some other folks have to say about zapplication:

Just about every art organization in town is non-profit, and I belong to some of them. They are not exploiting artists per se, but their charters just don't make a priority of helping artists to make a living, they're mostly about art education. The way they work is they collect dues, have meetings, put on workshops and organize group shows for the general membership in which the members have to pay a fee to display 2 or 3 pieces, and not much sells. The profits are then given to the charity they are chartered to support. Most of their charters are about raising funds for art education, a noble cause indeed, and I commend them for their efforts. But, they are quite simply not about making money for artists. The artists that are active in the memberships get a lot out of these organizations - community, ongoing art education, praise from their peers, etc. But I am not a student artist. I am a professional artist trying to make a living with my art. The only way I have found to make any money (I don't teach) is at art shows where I can have a booth and sell my work directly. I am in some galleries, but they are less successful in generating revenue because (1) they are not incentivized to sell my art in the same way that I am, (2) the standard commission rate is 50% so you have to raise the price so high that nothing sells and (3) the process is very impersonal because unless they attend the opening, the buyer doesn't get the opportunity to meet the artist.

I get a ridiculous number of emails and phone calls asking me to donate art to some charitable cause or another (I already give a lot of money to non-profits and charities, so I don't feel inclined to give my art away for free). One woman representing some charity that I had never heard of had the audacity to actually call and ask me to donate a $1000 painting that she saw on my website and liked. When I told her I would be happy to donate a print she said no thanks! Can you believe it! Actually, now that I look back on it, I think that was a scam call. Most of the people who contact me asking for donations of art think that artists can write off the amount the piece sells for at their auction, or the sale price the artist is asking. Not true, the IRS only allows us to write off the cost of materials. I bet most of you artists out there don't know that either, right? Next time a charitable event asks you to donate an artwork for their auction, say, sure, as long as I get half!

It always amazes me that artists are willing to go for this. The restaurant "allows" you to put your art up on their walls for some percentage commission, sometimes as much as 30%. This goes on because artists think they have to agree to this in order to get the opportunity to "show" their art. It should be the other way around. Businesses who want us to decorate their walls with our art should pay us to do so. Almost every restaurant in town has free art up on their walls. ARTISTS - JUST SAY NO! Don't you realize you are killing your opportunity to (1) rent your art for money (2) sell your art to the restaurant! I did a few restaurant shows early on. You have to do a lot of sucking up and jumping through hoops so you can put your paintings on the wall of a restaurant where they get food spilled on them, damaged and even stolen! And, I never sold anything at any of the restaurant shows I did, which is what most artists tell me is their experience as well. So why are we continuing to do this, and continuing to support the idea that art should be free? STOP GIVING YOUR ART AWAY!

A vanity gallery is an art gallery that rents its space to artists in order for the artist to have a show. The purpose in having a show at a vanity gallery is not the quality of the artwork, but the artist's ability to pay the gallery to host his/her artwork. There are also vanity websites and publications such as Who's Who books that charge for listings. The publications are typically distributed only to the persons who paid for the listing. These types of businesses make their money on fees collected from the artists and NOT on sales commissions. They typically are not incentivized and do nothing to try to sell your art.

I made the mistake of giving art-exchange.com $150 to put my art up on their website where they claimed they had a high number of interior decorators and corporate collectors who bought art from them. Actually, I gave them $150 after their pushy sales people hounded me on the phone for months to give them $450, to which I told them absolutely not! When the price came down to $150, I said what the heck, why not give them a try. That was 3 years ago and they haven't sold a single thing. Not only that, but their pushy salespeople are still calling me trying to get me to spend more money, even after I have asked them repeatedly to stop calling me! It is against the law in Texas for anyone to continue to call you when you have asked them to stop. I recently cancelled my agreement with them and sent them a cease and desist letter about the phone calls.

ARTISTS - NEVER, EVER PAY UP FRONT FOR SOMEONE TO SHOW YOUR WORK IN A GALLERY OR ON A WEBSITE.

See for yourself what others have to say about art-exchange.com:

http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=278349

Other vanity galleries/websites include Agora Gallery, ArtRom, Gallery Gora, NY Arts, etc. There are many art websites who offer free gallery pages, and they usually have nice front ends that make the job of uploading your images and writing descriptions easy. There's no reason to pay to put your art on a gallery website.

Art is Supposed to be Free, Right?

There seems to be a general opinion in Austin that art should be free. I ran across an interesting article written in March, 2008 on the Austin Chronicle's website entitled "Show and Sell - Austin art is getting national buzz, but is anybody buying it?" Anybody interested in buying art or being an artist in Austin ought to read this article. Also, the people of Austin who think art should be free need to read it as well. To quote the article -

"It is a fact that in Austin it's crushingly difficult to keep a visual-art space open. You can go look at the art, think it's beautiful, but if the artists don't get paid, they can't afford to be artists. I would like to see more artists be able to support themselves with their art instead of taking second jobs."

Go ahead, Austin, keep on thinking art should be free, exploiting artists and buying cheap ripoff "paintings" from China. Pretty soon that's all there will be because there will be no more artists and no more art!