City faces decision in ongoing battle over Jackson Square artists
No, it’s City Business and it’s all about the Benjamins baby. Just look at the blatantly bias line in this article about the issue of prints on Jackson Square…
That’s the time he expects it to take the city to come to its senses and rework a 2005 ordinance that banned artists from selling reproductions of their original work in the historic artist colony.
That’s not a quote in the article, it’s straight from the text written by the author. An editor let that through. So it should come as no surprise that the quotes that follow are essentially all from pro-print artists and their legal representation. The quotes opposed come from politicians but none from the 200 or so other artists on the Square who will be affected by lifting the ban.
The most pitiful thing is the statement that print sellers freedoms of speech and expression are being violated. That’s using the Constitution to do their dirty work. Those freedoms are just fine because their work can be displayed without using prints.
In the end it’s the audacity of the print artists that bothers me the most. Businesses have a model and they have conditions. To succeed they adjust their model to the conditions not the other way around. But at the peril of Jackson Square and the risk of it becoming another trite souvenir market, three artists who do just fine want to increase their margins anyway.
I don’t have a dog in this fight but the last time that I was at the market, I was disappointed to see that one artist had reproductions of some paper cut out art that he had done. It was really lovely work but with all of the original art around, the photocopies kind of cheapened his craft. However, I don’t don’t see what he’s doing as any different than other artists selling prints.