This interview is with Susan Farrell from www.Artcrimes.com www.graffiti.org
First of all let me congratulate and thank you and Brett on 10 years of service to our community. Bringing graff all over the world... I have had my site for almost 2 years and it has been one of the most time consuming things I have ever done.
Thank you. Yeah, in all the ways that count, the Web ate my life in 1993. It's exciting to be involved in the beginning of the information revolution, but it's also quite exhausting.
I can't even imagine 10 years of doing this.
Of course, when Brett and I started this, no one knew anything about making websites. We never asked ourselves what would happen next or how long we'd be doing this, because events were blowing our minds on a daily basis. For years we just held onto our chairs and said "oh sh*t!" a lot. I think it's the immediacy of the Internet that makes it so seductive. You can show something right now or look something up, right now. The problem is that most websites can never be truly finished and they tend to increase in value to the audience with their update frequency. So like many webmeisters, we put a toe in that ocean and were swept out to sea. How did you get into the graff scene? I would say I got into graffiti seriously as a graffiti photographer in Atlanta, around 1988. I'm a painter myself, so I got interested in graffiti from an artist's point of view, then started photographing it to record the ever-changing painted landscape around me. When you first started Art Crimes, was this what you envisioned? I didn't have a plan, I had a magnificent obsession. I expected photographers and academics to join forces with me to build something like an archive. I didn't expect an army of writers with zillions of photos, but when they soon appeared, I was very pleasantly surprised. In 1994 only university students and scientists had easy access to the net. It was 1995 or so before general public access started to happen. We had a lucky break though, when Newsweek wrote about Art Crimes in October 2004, which helped get the word out to writers that there was something for them in cyberspace. When access became possible, writers were first in line. I kept getting email from guys that said: "This is my first email! I found out about your site in the dentist's office!!!" I didn't know what could happen when we started out. I knew only that I had to begin something that would likely show its value only much later on. I felt I was performing a much-needed service (encouraging online archiving of graffiti and promoting graffiti artists) that would enable other people to do the really important things, such as write books and find their audience. Were there any doubts that Art Crimes would last? Art Crimes continues to be impossible, so I predict its collapse at least once a year. It's expensive to run because it's popular, which perversely threatens its existence. (So if everyone would please buy something from us or click an ad every now and then it would really help.) We went as long as we could without ads, but finally we figured our audience would probably rather see a few of them than have Art Crimes turn into a cobweb. How many people are involved in keeping Art Crimes going? 3 of me, 2 of Brett, 1/100 Meem and 1/20 Strange and Suroc, plus a cast of thousands who send in material. And of course we wouldn't continue to do it if not for the 30,000 or so people who visit every day and send us love. What is the formula for longevity on the web? Provide something unique or create the best source for something. Let your integrity and sense of humor show. Release new stuff on a predictable schedule (tip: not daily, you'll burn out). Start small and plan to scale up. Answer your email. If your site gets popular or you're trying to be a business: Plan what you'll give away and what you'll charge money for. Make the free stuff really really good. Try to provide some high-quality merchandise. Don't borrow impatient money. Don't expect to get rich. Keep the day job until you can pay yourself without eating your capital. You see a lot of info out there about marketing your website, and a lot of money goes down that drain. The real tricks are: to have a memorable and stable web address to have something interesting, funny, or useful on your website and to alert the group of people who most stand to benefit from it. If you do all that, word will spread quickly, easily, perpetually, and for free. As you add value to the Internet, other sites will link to yours, and that makes your search engine rank rise, which leads to more visitors, more linking, and so on. What do you have set for the future? The next thing we hope to do to move our Shockwave train painting application in house. We made it in conjunction with the Bronx Museum and it's eating up hard drive over there. It would be really cool if someone with a lot of free time stepped up next year to curate a "best of" feature for that also. Some of the cars are extremely well done. http://www.bxma.org/inprojects/ingraffiti/ How long do you plan on holding the fort? I don't know, are you ready? I guess till it stops being fun or starts being even more impossible. I would not have predicted I'd still be at it 10 years down the road though, so what do I know? It's hard to imagine being able to sustain the pace of the last couple of years, but nothing else I do gets the kind of appreciation Art Crimes inspires. I can't help thinking my efforts are worthwhile, and something worth doing can be hard to replace. How many sites do you host? I'd guess about 40 these days. Over the years we've taken in a few good sites with more traffic than they could afford or ones that needed to be archived, and others have evolved out of features we started that someone else continued. We don't think centralization is a good strategy on the Internet, so we encourage everyone who can to make their own site someplace where they are in control of it. What are the changes in the graff scene that you have noticed? Graffiti-related jams and gallery shows have increased exponentially in recent years, I think as a result of organizers being able to get the word out in advance. They can also check out a lot of artists' work online and invite them directly. Many writers now expect a global audience for some of their pieces, which may have an effect as well. The net is good for small businesses and professional artists in general, too, so it's been good to many of those who've made websites. Where do you see graff in the next 10 years? Man, everyone asks me that. I wish I knew. I have no idea where graffiti as a whole might be going, but I can imagine we'll be seeing a lot more interesting graffiti coming out of China, Korea, Russia and Eastern Europe. As an observer what do you think the graff community should do in order to be financially independent? Or should it remain underground? I think I have a soapbox around here somewhere ... Graffiti hasn't been underground since at least Style Wars, so it's time to stop pretending it's still a secret society. I think graffiti culture will always tend to exclude outsiders, so there's no need to continue to shoot other people in the foot for writing books and so on. I think if anyone makes money off graffiti's popularity, so should the writers. There are a lot of entrepreneurs of various kinds in the graffiti community, and I think they should expand their efforts online. Of course, cultural parasites do exist, so it's good to keep an eye out for them and to wrap every deal in paper. In America, many artists believe that artists must work with no reward in order to keep themselves and their art pure and untainted by the market ("starving artists"). In Germany, artists who do art for a living are called "free artists." I think the Germans have a better idea. There's more than one way to become a free-range human, of course, but being in charge of your own life and time has a lot to recommend it. Success takes time, though, so you better enjoy what you're doing. I think it's okay to get paid for doing work as long as you don't throw your ethics away in order to do it. When people buy art from an artist, they are also paying for the authenticity and expression of that artist. Your authenticity is not something you can run out of, and it's not something anyone can take away from you. The tricky part is not to let your business kill your joy. Designers get paid for their skills and experience, their imagination and sense of style. Graffiti writers become great designers every day. Designing is a way to use your skills without selling your original artwork too cheaply and without wearing your heart so close to your pocket. If writers decided today that they were not going to let companies and promoters take advantage of them anymore, then suddenly everybody would be getting paid, just like the musical contingent has been. Remember that the flyers, the ads, the cover art -- that all these folks want for free -- are the most important "visual collateral" (think art=bank) that events and products can have. If you are providing that crucial face to the world for something, you're directly effecting the sales of that thing. And of course, artists are likely to do a better job for those companies who recognize the need for quality and pay to get it. So that's the pep talk and here comes the professional advice: Be careful what you put your stamp of approval on when endorsing products, and always always get the details in writing before you deliver, even when you're doing business with people you know. Paper protects both parties, and it helps refresh the memory as time goes on. You don't have to be a lawyer to make an agreement, but if there's more than you can stand to lose at stake, pay a professional to look over your contract or agreement before it's signed. The most important thing to think about is which rights or uses are you selling or renting (licensing). For example, it's quite reasonable to sell someone the right to use your design for two years on t-shirts only. You don't need to sell them every right to the design forever, unless you're designing their logo or something that specific to them. Check Nolo out: http://www.nolo.com http://search.nolo.com:80/query.html?col=a2whole&qt=artists Artist's legal resources You can educate yourself there for much less than one hour of lawyer time costs. Then when you do spend money on lawyer time, you'll be able to ask the right questions quickly. Have you ever had any pressures to shut down the site? (By any political or private people or agencies) Everything we do is legal, so there's been no grounds for a legal attack, but every now and then a detractor will let loose on us with death threats in email or entrapment opportunities, etc. ("Hi, I'm only 13 years old and I want you to tell me how to tag on a train without getting caught.") Last time I checked there were one or two websites devoted to hating us also. We maintain mirror sites offshore, so there's no advantage to some authority shutting down one of them. Fortunately Art Crimes is one of the most popular art and education sites online, so there's also not much enthusiasm for wiping us out. I know there are a number of private copies of our site as well. If a disaster occurred, Art Crimes could be reconstructed by its fans several times over. You must get a whole lot of mail. How do you go about selecting what goes up first? Yeah I do. It's email that's eating my whole life these days. Unfortunately it's about half spam now too. I use a method Brett suggested. At the end of each month, I select the very best material we've been sent, then I add some of the great material that has sat in line the longest. I limit monthly production to 4 12-hour days, so whatever I can do in that time span, gets done. I give preferential placement to the first graffiti to be shown for a country and to the old-school writers. This year (2004) I've been running a 3-5 month backlog. One year I had to shut down submissions of new stuff so I could catch up. Since then, I've tried to be more selective instead, but the volume keeps going up. That's good, because I get better material to choose from, but it doesn't leave a lot of time for me to invite particular people to contribute. I just have to hope they will throw some material my way even though I don't always have time to ask for it. I'm a year behind now in dealing with link requests also, but I'm gaining some ground this year. I hope everyone will forgive me for what I am not doing. I'm pedaling as fast as I can. Wear a respirator! You are your most valuable asset. Be well. ---- [Thanks for asking great questions! Sorry some of my answers are so long.]