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  MICHAEL ALAN STIPEK May 11, 2010 at 6:34pm

  I talked to a number of artists at the recent Cottonwood Arts Festival in Richardson TX who were going to do the City Arts Festival Dallas. I mentioned that the show was being run by the Dallas 500, a group known for its infamous treatment of artists since the 1980s and early '90s (I did the show back then for about 8 years and had never been treated so consistently badly by festival directors and staff before or since, as were most other artists). These artists I talked to felt that the show couldn't go wrong, that it was in a good location, etc. I'm sorry for those that got burned. But in the future, the devil is in the details: read everything you can about a show, email friends and get their input. Maybe someone will come up with a way to do a history on various shows and add it to a data base, such as at ArtFairInsiders. And the data should be based on facts, not opinions, hearsay, or general insignificant gripes (e.g it's the directors fault it rained, the donuts were stale, etc.).
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  Jacqueline Webster May 11, 2010 at 10:46am

  I've noticed that a lot of smaller shows have started to use Zapp, which is good for tem but makes it harder to weed out the tiny, local shows. I've started doing indpendent research on any show that looks promising at first glance so I don't get snookered. I found one last week that looked promising and in a newspaper interview last year the promoter was excited that the artfair had over 30 artists exhibiting. Too small for me & not my crowd. Not to mention not worth the 13 hour drive. Lately I'm spending between 20 minutes to an hour researching individual shows. It's sucking up a lot of my time but it's necessary.