everyone wants my money

...which would make sense if I had any. As it is, I'm at the mercy of a generous spouse who makes me clean toilets in exchange for the time/space to create Frankenstein's artwork in the basement, so why come after me?

On Saturday at the art walk I was approached by a smarmy, deep-voiced guy handing out cards to all the artists who'd succumb to his siren call. I have always had a sixth sense about the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing type, which may be because I learned before I was out of diapers that what one is promised and what one actually gets have a nebuolus relationship at best. Take the guy who tried to sell me a vacuum cleaner when I was in my third or fourth year at university. I was living in a miniscule studio apartment, trying to make ends meet (and tuition) through student loans and a series of slave-wage jobs, but I agreed to have him demonstrate his Speed Queen because I actually needed the knife set. When he got to the point where he put a bag on his head, connected by a second hose to the Interior Sanitation System ("it's so much more than a vacuum cleaner!") so that he could dry his hair while vacuuming, I had to let him go before I burst a blood vessel. He even pulled the "you can take 10 years to pay it off and I have five kids at home to feed" routine. Seriously. It was an eye-opening (and highly entertaining) moment for me as to how far the exploited will go to exploit the exploitable. I have enough compassion that I felt sorry for him, but it was clear that the only thing on my menu was peanut butter sandwiches, so what was he thinking?

Which brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves: exploitation of the vulnerable. A former friend used to come over here and wax poetic about how he loved dogs and tell me the names he'd chosen for all the children he wanted to have, then kick the dog under the table and literally withold candy from the baby. It's salesmanship by bullies. Smarmy, deep-voiced guys showing up at art walks, telling desperate artists how gifted they are and how well he can market them without even mentioning the costs involved is like selling fear-mongering statistics and then bogus insurance policies to the elderly. You can sell rhinestone necklaces and call them diamonds to millionaires in Vegas every day and I'd call it a good day's work, but selling false hope or security to the vulnerable makes for seriously bad karma.

I was curious about what SDVG had to say, though, and actually wanted to know the price for digital scanning of images as that's useful to me, so I gave him my card and waited to see what would happen. Meantime, I looked at his website and discovered that he promises artists the moon and stars and says absolutely nothing about fees ~ or his commission. The website is cleverly dressed up to look like a gallery site, i.e. a place to sell art, not a place to exploit artists. He must have a huge amount of success selling his 'art services' (marketing, websites, printing services) to the vanity market (primarily retired folk trying to carve out a second career as artists ~ and since I was probably the third youngest person out of 18 artists on Saturday, he'd obviously lucked into his target market) because he didn't even bother to look at my website before ringing me up. He actually tried to sell his inflated web services to me before I told him that he might want to take a closer look at my card. You could almost hear the Homer Simpson moment when he called up my site on his computer. It may seem hard to fork over the standard 50% sales commission to reputable bricks-and-mortar galleries who, after all, take your work on a consignment basis, but they do all the marketing, post your work on their website, etc., at no charge. But to think there are artists out there who are vulnerable enough to pay serious cash up front for all of that with no actual physical display space, and have SDVGs take a cut, too, is just sad.

After that I got a call from the real estate agent who knows that we're looking to move. What he had for me was a newly-listed house that I already knew about, of the wrong size in the wrong neighbourhood for way too much money. Do I really look as blond as all that?

I think I'll leave that one 'til tomorrow, when the PMS has passed.