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I started Part 1 of this blog yesterday, if you are new to this thread you may want to start with it first.

Two new technologies ushered the art show scene into the late 1990's.

CELLPHONES AND STANDARDIZED PRE-MADE ARTIST'S BOOTHS.

In old school days you had to either wait til you got home to use a land-line, or feed phonebooths with lots of quarters or have a telephone credit card number to use anywhere.

Old school days, it was harder to keep up with buds at shows and see how they were doing. Getting approvals for all those credit card transactions was very labor-intensive.  Then came the cellphone.

Things changed overnight.  I remember seeing artists with their new phones gabbing away while at a show, usually in their downtime.  You could multi-task at a show now: order inventory, set up hotel reservations, order food, it opened up new horizons and made our biz a bit easier.

Of course, if we had phones, so did our patrons.  This was good and bad.  The good being they could call the missing mate when they wanted approval to buy from you.  I bet hundreds of husbands just loved being able to sit home watch football while the little lady shopped.  Heck, as long as she didn't buy a $10K painting they were OK with the process.

Nowadays, good luck finding a working telephone booth.  Some day, little kids will go to a museum and see one displayed and ask mommy,"Is that where I was born?"  Others will say, "What dude?  You put in a quarter and no screen pops up, what good are they?"

The bad side of telephones and today's multiple handheld digital devices is that it competes with us trying to sell our art.  When people are forever engrossed in the God-Almighty lit-up screen, it is pretty hard to close them.  When you are reeling in a sale and their screen lights up, it disrupts many a sale, and you lose out.

The mid-eighties and nineties were, for the first time,where  an artist could buy a premade booth.  It was the era of the KD canopy--the first popup.  Pull it out of the bag, expand it and voila!  You had an instant shelter.  Early ones did not fare well in heavy winds or rains.

I remember once in downtown Charlotte,NC , I came to my booth early on Sunday morn.  A big storm with winds had whipped thru earlier--and, lo and behold, there was a KD flipped over and sitting atop my booth.  I did not have a stinking KD.  I had a Newton.

It took a while to reinvent the wheel to make sturdier booths that could go up in a hour or less.  Newton Canopies, out of Ft. Myers made one of the best ones.  It was called a "Porta-canopy."

It was really strong, it shed water and it looked good.  I bought their fifth canopy made in 1986.  I still use it, with its original aluminum trusses.  I have only blown over once in 33 years with that canopy.  That was when a freak hurricane hit the Vero Beach show, in spring, in the early 90's.  My booth went down, so did everybody else's.

Newton sold to Flourish and the rest is history.  About this time, Trimlines debuted along with Show-Offs and the Light Dome.  KDs, and rival design knock-offs, got better.

People figured out you could stick hula-hoops in all four corners of a KD to keep water from collecting in buckets.  Extra heavy-duty frames replaced the thin aluminum.  Shows had a more consistent look.  It now was a novelty to see a home-made booth.  The Hippie-era of shows was toast.

One other development came out of all this. Now artists could have display walls made out of fabric, or premade panels.  The Booth was more compact to store.  So, less artists traveled with the racks bungied down, atop their roofs.  It became, more and more, an inside job.  Or, many started buying trailers to hook up to their vans.  You could store so much more inventory.

Premade booths also made it now easier to have a double-booth.

With a number of best-seller artists now using the double, it meant their were fewer spaces available at an art show.  Their doubles also looked very impressive and many times over-shadowed their neighbors.  Sales got bigger, and booth fees got bigger.  We will talk about that later.

The early to mid-ninties ushered in the all-time game-changer for selling at art shows.

THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION:  CAMERAS AND ART REPROS, THE APPLICATION PROCESS, RECORDING SALES ,AND ARTIST" WEBSITES

The digital era brought on some of the most profound changes to our industry at the close of the Twenty-ith Century. Where is Jim Morrison when we need him.

It was the era of instant gratification.

For a photographer, you no longer did it in the dark, you did it in the light.  On a photo-shoot you no longer put a rush order on for newly shot work.  Results were instantaneous.  You could edit now.  No waiting for images to come back from the lab.

It also democratized the whole photography profession. Image programs like Adobe Photoshop made everybody look good.  

In old school, if you were shooting slides and were off by more than a quarter-stop (I know, people are shaking their heads and wondering,"What's a stop, let alone a quarter-stop?"), the work would look like shit.  It separated the ones who were real good from the average.  Nowadays, it is hard to tell average from the real good.

The number of photographers applying to shows nearly doubled.  Press a button, edit, save in computer, press another button and you had a finished color photo.

Also, the new technology was more forgiving.  Once photographers could print on canvas, their work looked better.

Inkjet prints.  Lots of people know them as Giclees.  It not only transformed photographers, but all 2-D art. BTW.  Giclee is French for," spray  ink on my brioche."  Only kidding, everyone knows you spray it on...caviar!

Now painters and a lot of printmakers no longer  did expensive lithograph or offset print editions.  Some still do, especially the really good artists like John Costin, the bird man from Florida. 

But giclees were cheap and fast.  The public ate them up.

 When you could print out on canvas, the whole scene exploded into one color-orgasmic orgy.(Is that a little redundant?  It is very vivid).

Painters who did only originals started seeing a slump in their sales.  Shows responded by saying most limited editions had to be a small number like 250 or less.

Face it, canvases are here to stay.  The public loves them.  Don't have to mess with any glass, don't have to buy a frame.  They love it.

The next way the digital revolution changed us was the whole application process.

Old school ways.

 At the beginning of a new year you went to the Post Office and bought 100 pre-stamped post cards.  You addressed them to shows  you were interested in.  You requested a prospectus.  How quaint!  You also figured out real quickly to  buy a rubber stamp with your address because who wanted to write your address 100 times.  You would think you were back in Catholic school being tortured by the nuns.

You filled out the app and sent it in with a check for jury fee, numbered slides and a SASE.

Then you waited for results.  You waited on Friday, for that return envelope to arrive, minus slides, you knew you were in.  That was the process until...

Zapplication, Juried Art Services, Entrything, ad nauseum.

Zapp changed the whole game.

It was now easier and quicker to apply to shows.  No more running to the post office to make a deadline date.  No more keeping reams of slides on hand.

Shows loved it more.  Their applications for jury exploded.  They figured out that this was better than baked bread.  A lot of money is collected in the jury process which helps a show's profitability.

Images were now stored on your own personal Zapp site.  Imagery was now unified.  All digital files where of a certain number and they all had little black borders on them.  Jurors could sit at home and jury images on their own time.

Naturally, rivals jumped in like JAS and Entrything, but face it folks, it is mostly a Zapp process.

One of the big drawback to this whole process was the way shows now introduced a layer between you and the show.  It wasn't as easy to just call somebody and get needed info.

Paying for a booth became a shopping process.  Put in your card number and pay.  A few shows still wanted the booth fees sent to them via check.  Artigras is a good example.

Getting feedback from the jury results became a tedious, aggravating process.  None of them want to do it--or let's just say, very few.  Krasl, the St. Joseph,MI show is one of the best for giving feedback.  They have a very savvy director who is artist friendly.  Thank you Sarah, and happy new year.

This easy process now meant you had a ton of more competition for getting into shows.  Great work, alone, did not get you in.  The sheer length of the jury has to take toll on the scorers.

Also, there no almost no secrets in the industry anymore.  Everybody knows where the shows are now.  It took me years to accumulate knowledge of certain shows.  Now that is available at the click of your fingers.

Shows saw the numbers increasing for jury.  They figured. "What the hell, let's raise the jury fee.  What are they gonna do? Stamp their feet.  In the end, they will pay."

The other by-product of all this is the ways that dates, stated in the prospectus as deadlines for image submission, suddenly got extended.  More extra entries, more moola.

It is wrong what they are doing.

 Bayou City in Houston is one of the most recent to do it. Deadlines are not always etched in stone anymore.  It is a wretched process and I don't see shows changing their ways.  As long as their is a line of artists with money in hand wanting to apply, the shows will continue their practice.

It is dishonorable.  It is a sordid business model, and it will lead to a decline in our industry.  Greed does not go unpunished forever.

On a positive note, digital makes it easier for Artist Sales.

ENTER THE ERA OF NURITS AND THE SQUARE.

No more old school.  No more click-clack of machines running over cards and carbons.

Now it is the era of the card swipe.  Instant OK of the sale.  Heck, people now sign on a lit screen using their fingernail.  Personal checks.  Don't see many of those unless you are certain parts of the midwest.  They still like old school.  God Bless Them.

The card swipe procedure is going to change in the near future.  I will talk about it in my third blog which deals with future trends.

Lastly, digital made artist websites our new virtual stores.  Facebook and other social networks have opened up a whole new venue for selling art and using the process as a good follow-up mechanism for potential sales from art shows.

The camera on our cellphones has changed things.  

Savvy artists now encourage a prospective collector to shoot a JPEG and send it to their mate while at the show.  If they like it, you can close the sale.

The camera-phone makes the instant-moment at a show a big deal.  People see your work, shoot it and send it to their friends, they want to share the moment.  Unfortunately, most don't want to buy the work, they just want to share it. 

Some want to share it  in bad ways.  They want to shoot your work, and copy it.  Maybe call it their own, get people to buy it from them.  It has opened a Pandoras Box--the genie is out and will never be stuffed back in the bottle.

I am tiring, calling it a night.  Part three will deal with the now,now.  and, the future.  Stay tuned.  Give me some feedback.  What do you think about my comments?  Add your own experiences--but don't high-jack my thread.

Time for some red wine and football.

Aloha, Nels Johnson.