[patio11]

I would counsel a "friendly local fine artist" who feels threatened by the existence of $100 paint-by-photograph artworks produced in China to get better about their marketing, differentiation, and sales process rather than lamenting the decline of art. If they're selling something this substitutes for... that's a very unfortunate business decision.

(Too many of my creative friends, for all values of "creative", are socialized to believe that treating their profession like it is a business will somehow suck all the magic out of that. If you like friendly-local-fine-artist, you owe it to them to help counteract years of indoctrination on this score.)

A young lady at a Renaissance fair produced an artistic work heavily inspired by a photo of Ruriko and I at our wedding. (She, incidentally, undercharged and had to be tipped into accepting a reasonable wage, then attempted to convince me that I was overtipping. Art culture: GAH!) That work is certainly available for less than what she charged... somewhere over in China, where middle class RenFair participants who are primed to spend money are presently not wandering while considering "Hey I wonder if I could get a wedding photo done as human art?"

A really smart business decision she made was a) bringing several samples of high-saliency events done in her signature style (weddings/graduations/etc) and b) hiring a barker, whose only job was selling passerby on artwork when she was producing it on the spot. Another smart decision was working directly with clients on the spot: that was a definite value add versus uploading the JPG into a CRUD app then shipping it halfway around the world. The venue handles a lot of customer selection for you, too -- you can imagine that "homemade using the techniques of the ancients; not like that factory-produced nonsense you'd find at BigBox" carries a lot of weight with many of the people who willingly bust themselves back to the Middle Ages for part of a day. (I'd note that pitch was successful at selling several hundred dollars worth of soap in a ten minute period I observed the soap store. Having used $20 of it myself, I can reliably report that P&G ROFLstomps your typical artisan on soap quality, but then again they don't sell any soap called Dragon's Blood, so decisions decisions.)

[zeroecco]

it's Dragon's Blood, I mean common, who can compete with that?!