maybe it's the herringbone

Amidst the standard spam for illicit pharmaceuticals, pornography, gray market wristwatches, and penny stocks, I get art spam. On good days I ignore it goodnaturedly, on not-so-good days I resent it. The art spam of which I write is not a variant of a 419 scam, with widows of recently deposed African dignitaries seeking to share their art collections with me and the numerous other addresses they've collected.

The art spam is only spam in the sense that its senders cast a wide net with little thought given to how each recipient is realistically going to respond. Unfortunately, very little of it is egregious enough to be drop dead funny. Most of it is earnest and well-intentioned.

The art spam falls into several categories:

1. I want every curator and gallerist within 200 miles to see my art. Technology has made it exceptionally easy to compile a list of email addresses of galleries and art curators and send blanket emails to as many as your smtp host will allow. In fact, there are websites that have compiled this information already in an effort to provide resources to aspiring artists. And while it is slightly (but only so slightly) flattering to be bulk mailed alongside Jack Hanley, Stephen Wirtz, Gallery Paule Anglim, the Fraenkel Gallery and the others that take out ads and get shows reviewed in Artforum and Art in America, the fact that you can see their addresses and fifty to a hundred more, well, you really doubt the effectiveness of the message.

Generally the sender of these messages does colorful figurative or landscape painting, fractalesque digital prints, or what I call "sad tree art," expressionistic drawings or paintings with lots of gray and black, with some or all of the following: menacing storm clouds, overgrown weeds, shadowy figures, menacing skyscrapers, hunched over figures, boarded up shacks or cabins, boarded up Victorian row houses or tenements, abandoned toys, abandoned railroad tracks, and a tree with drooping branches -- the "sad tree". Most of the time the art spammer wants you to look at his/her website to glimpse further examples of his/her "unique brilliance." Some of the time the art spammer is inviting you to look at his/her work exhibited either a) at a cafe or restaurant somewhere you might go or b) at a gallery in some distant suburb you concede statistically probably has an art gallery or two, but you've never heard of before, the gallery that is, you have heard of the suburb though you only vaguely know which freeway you'd take to get there.

2. I want to show at your gallery. Sometimes with the same ineffective bulk mail method. Mostly these are sent individually or to only a few recipients. Almost all of these do not bother to look for submission policies or procedures information or somehow feel that it doesn't apply to them, that they are somehow special, and the unique brilliance of the low res images attached to the email will cause you to jettison your normally required proposal packet. Most appear not to have done the recommended research into what the solicited gallery actually shows by using the wondrous internet that has allowed them to email you pictures of their art, to look at pictures of the art that your gallery exhibits. Half the time they will include some description or statement about their work in the solicitation email ... most of the time the description is vague enough to be useless or so trite as to be annoying, same goes for the statement, in fact, the statements are generally pretty useless and annoying.

3. Contribute to our fundraiser event! These mostly don't come from individual artists plying their wares, but from organizations (formal and informal) which should "know better." The art business is largely a people business. It's highly social: who you know, who they know, how you approach them, how who they know and you know approach you or them, etc. But the approach is a key part of things. When an arts organization sends another arts organization art spam about donating to their fundraiser, the sender should acknowledge the recipient as an organization that is conceivably competing for the same ambiguous pool of attention, donations and goodwill, and state what the sender hopes the recipient will do with the solicitation.

Does the solicitor want the organization receiving the message to forward it to their mailing list, contribute out of its own coffers, what? Often this art spam is about donating money, donating art work, or paying a premium to attend an event, but occasionally it's about participating in some new or growing venture. Again, the question is, "What do you want me to do with this information?" They almost never say, and I am surprised again and again by the highly funded, pro outfits that share spam tactics with the amateurish sad tree artists.

One of the recent ones attached an invitation letter to artists that had major spelling and grammatical errors, not to mention some really dopey writing, though I've been in the art scene long enough to realize that my "dopey writing" reads like honeyed inspiration to others, such as requesting that in the short descriptions of slides submitted, the artist list their "muse, inspiration," as well as medium and date.

Another recent one was looking for advisory board members for a new arts space, specifically seeking "vibrant individuals." Vibrant, as used in art solicitations and PR is one of those flexible words that doesn't really mean anything, but must mean something to someone, but I'd imagine few are clear on what exactly the writer is really saying. Vibrant is not a simple signifier in the tree-tree-tree or chair-chair-chair mode, or one with a code that's obvious to its intended audience like "family values" or "420 friendly." In the literature of cultural tourism, vibrant is often used in conjunction with "colorful" and "diverse," and probably when it first became common was code to the WASPy denizens of suburban Connecticut or Minnesota that this area has dark skinned people that don't shop through the LL Bean catalog. They don't wear beige, navy and hunter green. I'm guessing that the birth of "vibrant" was in the 60s and 70s during the fad for celebrating one's ethnic heritage, which among certain ethnicities involved wearing clothes with patterns that optically vibrated somewhat.

But seriously, now, vibrant? Maybe there is a niche audience for "vibrant" and I'm not part of it. Maybe there are folks that nod sagely at the mention of "vibrant individuals" and recognize that these folks are looking for people like them, and not like those other non-vibrant people. But I'm at a loss, honestly. The word "diverse" did not appear, and it's socially acceptable to say that you would specifically appreciate the participation or contributions of people of color. And while I'm not Asian, Latina, or Black, I strongly doubt that these people of color would find a special meaning for "vibrant" that evades me in my whiteness. The vagueness of vibrant seems ineffective or at odds with the aim of "finding the right sort of people" for this advisory board.

There are plenty of specific words to describe attitudes or experience that would do better to filter in the type of folks they might want: enthusiastic, open-minded, visionary (as much as I dislike the word), grass-roots, committed, savvy, responsible, multi-talented, invested ... the list goes on. But vibrant? I suppose it might filter out people that perceive themselves as "straight-laced" or "boring," though I've seen so many ambitious art endeavors fail or never come to fruition that would have been helped greatly by the input of a straight-laced boring person, though the arts are a magnet for people escaping straight-laced boring backgrounds who don't want to think of themselves as ... straight-laced and boring people. Perhaps this is the niche audience for "vibrant"? Though I often play the role of the straight-laced boring person in arts organizing, and in my straight-laced boring persona, I'd be more likely to respond to a solicitation that was more specific, probably soliciting people with certain skills like facilities management, accounting, legal expertise in negotiating leases and contracts.

In my straight-laced boring persona, the only meaning for vibrant that I can come up with is a propensity to wear herringbone patterns that when captured on video, create an illusion of ... vibrating.