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rtilrtil · 6 years

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A-kon Artist Alley: Art Theft & Staff Indifference

Last weekend i was at A-Kon, an anime convention in Ft. Worth, Texas. this was my 3rd year tabling at their artist alley and almost certainly my last. while i’m disappointed to say that, what took place over the weekend was unacceptable and disrespectful to every creator that bothered to show up there.

if you are a creator who has ever been to or have considered tabling at an artist alley, please consider reading. thank you.

before i continue, i’d like to say that i don’t blame any one single person for this, and i do believe that there were lots of people trying to do the right thing, but ultimately those who have the responsibility and the power to protect the artists failed to do so. i am making this post because i think it is important for as many artists as possible to know what happened at A-kon 2018 in the hopes that the staff is more aggressive about their own policies in the future - and if not, at least let people know to avoid a convention where important rules that keep thieves OUT of artist alley are ignored.

moving on to the events of the con:

on Thursday evening i set up my table next to an empty corner table. the tables are set up in an island format, so every island has 4 corners which get 2 tables instead of one to form a square shape. when i came in Friday morning - the first day of the con - the corner was still empty.

about halfway through the day, a few people arrived to start setting up there. at first i thought they were late, but i later found out that they were waitlisted and were offered the table to replace whoever was originally supposed to be there. this will be important later.

a few hours later they ended up setting up this:

now a setup like this is typically something you see in the vendor’s hall, where actual companies sell licensed products and other merchandise not made by the vendors.

this setup is highly uncommon for artist alley and most certainly violates both clauses of this A-kon artist alley display rule:

not to mention another rule stating you can only take up 4 feet of space behind you, where they had an entire table set up for their merchandise.

you can trust me when i say that at most artist alleys there is not only not enough space for this monstrosity to be set up to begin with, but would be asked by staff to be torn down almost immediately.

but that is really only the tip of the iceberg, because the red flags started going up way before they finished setting up.

although the pictures are a bit blurry, you may notice something strange about the products on display - they all look like they’re from different artists.

and indeed, many of them are - in fact, it seemed apparent as the weekend went on that none of the work for sale at this booth was made by the people running it.

now proxy selling at A-kon and many other cons is allowed, but this is what the rule says:

This is where my earlier point about this table being waitlisted comes in to play. I have to assume the people running it were local, because a staff member implied that they were basically notified during the weekend that a table had opened up and they could come in to take the their place.

When you sign up to most conventions, you are asked to post a portfolio link, and part of doing that is to vet the people coming in to make sure they have.. well, a portfolio. You want to make sure the artists coming in to artist alley will be selling their own work.

and while I have no idea what link they gave the staff, the only website they had on display was an Etsy page where you can order a custom made phone case.

No tumblr, no deviantart, no pixiv, no instagram, no website..nothing. So there’s only two possibilities here:

The vendors set up a fake portfolio site full of some or all of the art on display here claiming it to be their own, and A-kon staff believed it

A-kon didn’t look at their portfolio at all, and just took the $275 from them without bothering to vet them at all

Now some of you may be asking why I would assume they would lie about claiming some of the art to be their own. Here’s where things get a little weird.

On Saturday, I was able to find one of the artists who made the art on one of the pillows they were selling. They were an artist in a foreign country thousands of miles away not attending the convention. The artist told me that the vendors had permission to use their art, but the story the vendors told was a little..different.

When the staff confronted the vendors about concerns of stolen art, the vendors claimed that the artist was their sister, but that she was currently on vacation and couldn’t attend. In fact, they claimed that all the art they had for sale was made by their family.

now why would you tell a bizarre lie like this if you had permission from every single one of your proxy artists? the only answer is that they clearly didn’t, and needed a blanket excuse to cover all their bases.

to make matters worse, they also refused to give any contact information to the staff for all the artists in their “family” that were not attending the convention.

the staff didn’t really seem to care about this at all? i found that a little bizarre. this kind of behavior is beyond suspicious and i can’t imagine how naive you’d have to be to think nothing fishy was going on with sketchy “proxy” vendors who have no problem lying straight to your face. if your one job is to enforce the rules of Artist Alley and you can’t do it, why are you even there?

anyway, it gets worse.

take a look at some of these phone cases they had for sale.

what you’re seeing here is not just a mix of fanart from various artists, but also copyrighted photos of the K-pop group BTS and officially licensed art and stitches from anime like Himouto! Umaru-chan, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Free!, Diabolik Lovers, Ouran High School Host Club and probably many others I don’t recognize.

Just to point out a few easy-to-find examples: here’s a stitch from the anime Himouto! Umaru-chan, ripped directly from the anime and printed out in a phone case.

How about that Halloween-themed FMA:Brotherhood phone case in the first image? Well, just type “fullmetal alchemist halloween” into Google Images and it’s the first result!

This is a scan of official promotional art for FMA that there are hundreds of results for.

How about that one of Free! Iwatobi Swim Club? Turns out it’s official art from the Free! Eternal Summer 2015 Calendar - sold, created, owned and licensed by none other than Kyoto Animation, the studio that made it.

I can’t speak for all the fanart on display here as it’s very difficult to find just through google searching, but even if I could, I wouldn’t want to drag them in to this - because at least one of them was aware this was going on, even though the vendors lied about who they were. all I can tell you is that many attendees and artists in my island recognized many art pieces on their products and knew the artists were not present and not aware their art was being sold.

so while these vendors may have had permission to proxy sell some of the stuff they had, it’s fairly obvious that this wasn’t the case for everything, and they lied to the staff to try and cover it up.

as I said earlier, on Saturday I expressed my concerns about the items on sale to the Artist Alley control booth. I even went through the trouble of showing them how to find the art through reverse image search to prove that it was stolen while trying to run my table solo. funnily enough - as i was talking to a staffer at the control booth, an attendee was also complaining about the same booth to another staffer with pictures of art on pillows from artists he recognized who were not present at the convention. I thought that was funny.

at the end of the day, a number of staff appeared on-site to question the vendors about their merchandise. statements were taken from me and a few other artists nearby, and it looked like maybe something would be done about this blatant theft on display.

but as i returned to sell on Sunday, the booth was still up and fully operational. when i asked why, the A-kon AA staff replied via twitter that it was “pending review”. another artist was told that they traced all this art (lol) and that tracing was allowed, however this contradicts another one of their rules:

by this point, the con was almost over - the vendors had gotten away with it, despite numerous voices of concern coming from artists and attendees alike - and indeed, this booth was allowed to sell stolen art all weekend uninhibited to unknowing attendees.

as for what other creative excuses the vendors may have had to tell the staff, if the staff even cared or they were actually duped by their obvious lies i don’t know.

here’s the point: artist alley is supposed to be a space for individual artists to sell their own creations. and while some labor was at least spared on the phone cases, the centerpiece is clearly the art, and the art did not belong to these vendors. none of the art belonged to these vendors.

so let’s break down the facts about what took place here:

a corner table was sold to waitlisted vendors in artist alley at a-kon (this means a-kon made double their money on this corner table..really makes you think 🤔 🤔 🤔 )

the vendors’ products were not vetted as the staff was obviously unaware of what was being sold

the vendors broke multiple display rules and nothing was done

the vendors lied to staffers and were caught lying and nothing was done

the vendors were selling stolen art and nothing was done

the vendors refused to give out contact information they were supposed to have for the artists they were proxying and nothing was done

the a-kon staff either does not take their own rules seriously, enforce them in any way, or are incompetent or otherwise incapable of doing so

at this point, the artist alley at A-Kon may as well be a vendor space where greasy conmen and thieves can just slap art on whatever and make a killing, because that is how i felt after watching what was essentially a dog and pony show of A-Kon staff pussyfooting around an issue that should’ve been dealt with swiftly and sternly.

this shit shouldn’t fly and while the vendors already got off scot-free, i can only hope that shedding light on this will help with stopping this issue from spreading, because you can bet that if other art thieves catch wind of the fact that A-Kon staff don’t give a shit about enforcing their own rules that they’ll tag along for the free ride.

If you’d like to read the A-Kon artist alley rules for yourself, i copied them from the email and put them in this pastebin.

if you’ve read this far, thank you for reading, and if you know anyone who participates in artist alleys in any fashion, please share it with them if you found this concerning.

#artist alley #akon2018 #akon29 #akon #art theft

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