ArtId - Art Blog
Art Marketing Minute - Email Contacts. What's Real?
by artid , February 5, 2010—10:10 AM
Occasionally on ArtId, we get a person or company that contacts a number of our members through the contact page in their ArtId galleries offering artists anything from representation to licensing deals. Sometimes these offers are legitimate and, unfortunately, sometimes they are not. Because your contact page is open for anyone to use, these emails cannot be dealt with as spam. An email received through your ArtId contact does not mean that we have endorsed the company or person.
So, we'd like to give you some tips on how to discriminate between truly interested business people and those whose real goal is to get you to pay them a lot of money for nothing.
How to Compare
1.A legitimately interested person will identify themselves right away and give you information about themselves and/or their company.
Beware of emails where the writer does not divulge the company name or does not tell you exactly what they are interested in doing.
2. A legitimate email will most likely address you by name and make mention of your work, how the person found you, and why they think you are the artist they want to work with.
Beware of emails that appear generic and do not regard you or your work personally. Likely those emails are being sent to a large number of artists by cutting and pasting the same email over and over again into contact pages.
3. A legitimate proposal will work within a standard of operating procedures that exist within the art business world.
Offers that promise too much probably cannot deliver.
If you receive an email that you are unsure about, let us know and we will investigate it. When we know that an unsavory person or company is contacting our artists, we post a notice in the Announcements section of your ArtId which appears when you login.
COMMENTS
( homepage )
02/07/2010 * 18:19:16
The recent receipt of unsolicited emails from QingFeng Art in China is perplexing. It cannot be called "spam", since ArtId publishes artist contact details which amount to implicit permission for third parties to send emails to these addresses.
Why would a painting factory, specialising in reproductions, want to contact artists?
There is a small possibility that someone claiming to be an artist sends an image to China to have it reproduced in oils on canvas in an impressionist style, for example. That someone could maintain, if queried, that the main source of intellectual property is the original photographic image. (I can concur that a major element of a realistic landscape is often the fleeting light of a sunrise, sunset, shaft of sunlight through billowing clouds, or other ephemeral event captured in a photograph, then painted at leisure in the studio).
Nevertheless, it confounds me that a supposedly thriving international business should seek channels to market through a network of relative novices. I am guessing that serious art galleries would not touch these Chinese artefacts with a forty-foot barge pole, so the Chinese marketers have to find a way into the low-cost art distribution network. Ergo ArtId and presumably other art sites.
So, while I cannot see anything illegal about this type of online marketing (source of contact details provided, name and address of QingFeng Art provided), I am still scratching my head wondering why these Chinese painting factories (and there are many) contact individual artists.
ArtId Staff ( homepage )
02/10/2010 * 15:21:50
It's really more like phishing than spam. You want your contact information on your site, but you don't want every passer by ringing your doorbell and offering to sell you something.
It's getting worse, the telemarketers, direct mail, email, all are a way for unscrupulous people to get your attention. This may be a real live company but I would be very wary of doing business with them. It's not illegal but it's damned annoying and some people are going to get ripped off. Members write us every week with some offer they are getting asking if it's legit. We just don't want anyone to get taken.