An excellent post and full of insightful information; thanks for sharing it. I can definitely agree with the "whitewashing the past" bit. Every artist starts off at the bottom. My work from the mid- to late-nineties pales in comparison to what I can do now, though folks still remember my old stuff. Annoyingly enough, they also frequently recall the 3-4 cervix shot pictures I did, quickly forgetting the 400+ other drawings I had produced. Aarrrrghh!
--JMH
--- In SkunkworksAMA_at_yahoogroups.com, Rick Pikul <rwpikul@...> wrote:
>
> On Saturday 06 June 2009 10:03, madhentairabbit_at_... wrote:
> > On Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:13:09 -0000, "Blindfelid" <jferrite77_at_y.....> wrote:
> > > Wow, the reality is starting to sink in. I thought these disturbing
> > > fetishes only existed the silly drawings one finds on the chan boards.
> > > I've never been to a furry con. I would like to go just to check out the
> > > art and buy some prints or comics. But if the majority of the con goers
> > > are like that, it doesn't sound appealing to me.
> >
> > I've been to a number of cons, and for the most part, they're not
> > really like that. Or at least, not these days; there *was* a time when
> > that sort of outrageous behavior was more openly tolerated or even
> > encouraged -- but even then, I seem to remember that the really infamous
> > "problem child" stories mostly originated from one or two specific
> > conventions,
>
> What's more, a fair chunk of those horror stories come from a con where it
> wasn't the furries who were the big issue: It was the other convention in
> the hotel that brought in an entire brothel. Fan conventions are, quite
> simply, some of the best behaved conventions out there, (largely because we
> can't afford to write off 6-figure damage deposits).
>
> There are a few things that tend to generate a belief that things are getting
> worse:
>
> The horror stories never go away, and are often told as if they happened no
> more than a year or two ago.
>
> The stories 'breed' because they mutate as they pass from person to person,
> and over time differently mutated versions of the same story will seem to be
> about different events.
>
> The cons are getting bigger and more numerous, so there will be an increase of
> stories simply due to population increase plus there is less of a chance that
> in any given group of people there is someone who can go: "Oh, THAT. I was
> there and let me tell you what really happened...."
>
>
>
> The issues with art are also partly illusion:
>
> The first thing is that, as humans, we tend to whitewash the past. The
> biggest reason for this is that we tend to not bother remembering that which
> is forgettable. I've recently been going through some old boxes of comics,
> and a fair chunk of the stuff from the '90s boom is crap, but those generally
> weren't the titles that people remember. With the anthologies, the quality
> of an issue is generally remembered as the quality of the best story, more so
> if it was a popular series or serial.
>
> When looking back at the artists who used to be around, the things we tend to
> remember is the quality of their work late in their career and how long they
> were around for. (This isn't restricted to visual media, people remember
> that Mozart wrote great music and that he wrote his first symphony at 8,
> people rarely consider that there might be a reason that first symphony is
> never performed.)
>
> There is a _LOT_ more posted now then there used to be: FA sees more
> submissions in an hour than alt.binaries.pictures.(erotica).furry,
> fur.artwork.adult/erotica/misc and the Avatar archive combined generally saw
> in a week. More volume means more of the fringe stuff, because a small
> fraction of a large number is bigger than a small fraction of a small number.
>
> This volume does encourage those with fringe tastes to post more, for exactly
> the same reason that alt.fan.albedo and alt.fan.furry encouraged people to
> post about furry: People saw that they weren't the only one who liked that
> stuff.
>
> --
> Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad)
>
Received on Sat Jun 06 2009 - 23:38:05 CDT