Creative Cogitation

I dunno, how do you react when some­one clearly has taken advan­tage of you and not deliv­ered on what they said they were going to do?  Recently I and other mem­bers of my group were courted by a cer­tain city to do a cer­tain show on a cer­tain day in a cer­tain loca­tion.  We were told the estab­lish­ment that we would be affil­i­ated with & located next to, would be run­ning a spe­cial for the event and that the city would be drop­ping vis­i­tors off right in front of this estab­lish­ment.  I juried in, signed on & paid a fee of $50 sev­eral months ago for a 10’x10’ booth & a one-shot 4-hour oppor­tu­nity to show & sell dur­ing this event.  The down­side is the loca­tion of this spot, which is up an alley and out of eye-shot of the main drag, but given a trol­ley stop, and sig­nage of  an estab­lish­ment run­ning drink spe­cials I fig­ured we should do OK.

In the mean­time the pro­moter of the event who got me involved has been pro­mot­ing, and I myself have done my own mar­ket­ing men­tion­ing the city and the estab­lish­ment, my par­tic­i­pa­tion in it, and that I would be there right next to the trol­ley stop.

Fast for­ward to the night of the show.  I get there after spend­ing sev­eral hours with my roadie (DH) load­ing up my van with art-du-jour, trin­kets, light­ing and all man­ner of other things one need to have to show and sell stuff at night.  It takes a cou­ple of hours.  We get there and it takes another cou­ple of hours to set up. I sell paint­ings, which mean walls, among other things-it is quite nice when done, but it does take time and is labor inten­sive.  When I am done, I decide it would be nice to stop over to the estab­lish­ment and take five, only the estab­lish­ment is hav­ing a pri­vate party which is to con­tinue halfway into the stated hours of the event.

I am feel­ing crabby after to hik­ing to pub­lic restrooms & a might bit parched as well but I fig­ure the trol­ley stop will make it all bet­ter.  You guessed it — there was a trol­ley stop — but it was about half a block away where debark­ing pas­sen­gers couldn’t really see us, not right in front of the estab­lish­ment as our group had been lead to believe. Any­body look­ing for us was going to have a hard time find­ing us if they had never been there before.

I remind you this loca­tion is up an alley and around a cor­ner so folks on the main drag don’t really know you are there with­out decent sig­nage.  Which brings me to the sig­nage: The sig­nage was a large sand­wich board placed dead-center & per­pen­dic­u­lar to the entrance of the alley, psy­cho­log­i­cally block­ing the entrance. It made no men­tion of our lit­tle group, and merely indi­cated that the estab­lish­ment was closed until 8 PM for “pri­vate party only;” from our stand­point it was basi­cally a “DO NOT ENTER” sign.

Need­less to say, traf­fic into our lit­tle cor­ner of this hap­pen­ing scene did not exist-despite music, lights and wares aching to be exam­ined and despite lots of pedes­trian traf­fic half a block away.   A friend of a fel­low ven­dor pur­chased a sin­gle greet­ing card from me; that was it the whole night.  I prob­a­bly had 10 vis­i­tors, obvi­ously brave and curi­ous soles who decided to explore & ignore the pri­vate party only sign.  We folded up our tents as 9 PM instead of 10 PM because there was no traf­fic and the estab­lish­ment in ques­tion closed soon after their pri­vate party let out.

So I paid $50 to be there, plus a sales tax license, plus 20+ man-hours (tear down and put away takes just as long as load and set-up), plus wear and tear on my van & equip­ment, to sell a greet­ing card for $2.88 to some­one else’s roadie. That card cost me about $1.40 and for which the city and state are going to take their $0.24 bite, plus 2-$0.44-cent stamps to mail in the sales tax form report­ing this glo­ri­ous sale; my net on the card is about $0.30. Basi­cally I paid $50 for the oppor­tu­nity prac­tice set­ting up a show and to sit there in the dark for 4 hours. Those sit­ting there with me at this non-event were equally dis­en­chanted; the pro­moter was also in our num­ber, and hav­ing a hard time look­ing us in the eyes.

The day after the event, the pro­moter offered us a free show in the same loca­tion.  Yeah.  Right.  OK, the pro­moter is look­ing for another place for us to put down our stakes, but at the moment…  I have avoided men­tion­ing which city, which event and which pro­moter as I hope sooner or later some­one will make this right, but who knows what will happen-I am not look­ing for any addi­tional trou­ble, just vent­ing.  $50 is a lot of money when you are flat broke.  It could be worse I know, but in the lan­guage of the wild west “I feel road hard and put away wet.” Already fig­ur­ing I shouldn’t throw good time and money after bad.  But I don’t know what I could have done that would have made this turn out dif­fer­ent and feel pretty stu­pid about it.

I guess the worst part is I don’t under­stand why.  Why would the city ask us to do this thing in the first place?  Why would the estab­lish­ment just bail on us like that? What did they get out of our art-show fire-drill? I know the pro­moter didn’t see this com­ing ’cause I sure didn’t and beside the pro­moter was right there rot­ting with us.

What do you all think?

Yours in art,

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

PS. I am still look­ing for Spon­sors & Con­tribut­ing Patrons to help me pay the esti­mated $8000 it is going to cost me to attend this event.  Every lit­tle bit helps.

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