deviantART Members Prepare to Sell Their Art as Microstock
As reported by Photopreneur: deviantART Members Prepare to Sell Their Art as Microstock.
So after Flickr, deviantART is now also planning to offer a ‘commercial’ outlet for its members to sell their work, by teaming up with Fotolia, a player in the (micro)stock photography market.
The question that came to my mind immediately after reading this is “Why (micro)stock?” It seems like a rather strange choice…
I mean, deviantART is primarily an artists’ community, with its own unique identity and culture, and that culture is totally different from the microstock community. DeviantART is about artistic expression, while microstock is about crunching out lots of stuff in the hope that it will sell in large enough numbers to make a profit. To me those are diametrically opposed goals, one geared to pleasing the creator of the work, the other one geared to pleasing the crowd of cheapskate photography buyers.
And the works themselves also seem to be of a totally different nature. If deviantART members live up to their status as ‘artists’, the work they produce would primarily appeal to art buyers rather than to stock photography buyers. They are created for a different purpose: individual expression vs. large scale utility. Moreover, their very nature as ‘individual works of art’ would seem to warrant a more upmarket price model than what microstock has to offer.
And finally, anyone can sell their work through a stock-house if they want to – including people who are already active on deviantART. The fact that they are artists shouldn’t stop them from also creating and marketing commercial work. So is there really a need to combine the two?
For it seems that mixing two totally different communities creates the danger of corrupting the individuality of one of them. In the best-case scenario Fotolia will expand its activities to selling art besides commercial stock. In that case the art market will gain a new player, and the combination will create a richer audience for the deviantARTists. In the worst-case scenario however, deviantARTists will start to produce commercial stock and upload and sell it through the deviantART community, flooding the site with work that can harldy be called ‘individual art’. In this scenario there is no enrichment, only a dilution of the artistic identity of deviantART. In the end, deviantART might even become ‘just another stock-site’, not much different from the other players in the market…
I think it would have made a lot more sense had deviantART teamed up with a player that is explicitly targeting the art world instead of the commercial photography market. That would provide its members with an outlet that is geared to their specific needs, so they can remain true to their particular nature and goals as artists.
As it stands however, it seems one of the two parties will likely have to change in order to make this awkward combination work. And since this is a battle between art and commerce, between individuality and money, I fear history shows us who the likely winner will be…
