Recently there’s been a lot of hating on certain furry art pricing models. Yes, such drama, much ado about nothing. Wow. Everyone has an opinion about “your character here” pictures and auctions and adoptables, etc. The furor started months and months ago. The more I saw complaints, the more my curiosity grew--curiosity about how to characterize the argument. Think about it. The whole issue isn’t just a matter of, “Oh, so-and-so is charging too much,” or, “This artist doesn’t deserve to treat customers like that,” even if that’s what people are writing. No, there’s a deeper conversation taking place and we don’t even realize it.

It would be nice to get people on the same page in terms of definitions. As Thomas Hobbes wrote, the most basic building block of any intellectual conversation is the definition of terms. The furry fandom is not using common terms to describe concerns over art pricing. Accusations of “price gouging” or “making a quick buck” are not constructive criticism. We can do a better job of defining terms relating to furry art in a way that people can think critically about what artists are advertising.

The artist-client-audience system is an interesting ecosystem. The artist’s career starts with posting a portfolio which attracts an audience. Some individuals in the audience become clients of the artist, who grow the artist’s portfolio, adding to non-commissioned works the artist posts. As the artist’s work improves in quality or fills a niche (or both), the artist’s audience grows, and the cycle increases until the artist’s output is restrained not by demand but by the time it takes to work on art. More simply put, the first goal of an artist on FA is to gain access to clients. When that demand is met, the burden of access is shifted from the artist to the client. For example, an artist who receives 30 commission requests but can only take 15 clients has no problem finding work; it is the fan making the request who seeks access to the artist.

When an artist’s goal shifts from gaining access to satisfying demand, that artist gains more control over their choice of business methods. In the first stage of their career the artist may have made concessions in pricing or creative license to gain access to clients. In the second stage, that need has diminished, so the artist has more freedom to choose the rules of how they will work, negotiate more favorable prices, or choose clients more selectively, for example. Some business methods become more feasible to employ: namely, anything involving fan participation.

For building block purposes I will refer to business methods--ways in which an artist makes money--using the concept of project archetypes. We can say here that a project archetype is a type of process by which an artist produces a single work. For instance, commission slots are a project archetype. “Your character here” auctions are a project archetype. These are what I really want to dive into. As a community we need to better understand how these processes work before we can critically evaluate them. What is the qualitative difference between each model? It’s time to analyze.

Several characteristics define each model. Foremost, furry art is based heavily on imagined characters, and “fursonas”. When we are talking about the artist-client-audience ecosystem, we’re talking about the system by which characters are rendered from thought and into some visual, written, or heard form. A few key aspects of this process vary between project archetypes. For instance, the property of art by which it revolves around a specific character is what I will call “exclusivity”. Exclusivity is of paramount importance in the furry fandom. Characters in art (and the owners of said characters) have much more presence in the community than those never seen. I call this property exclusivity because of the way that a character’s owner “borrows” the artists talents for a project that relates exclusively to the client; the artist accepts the opportunity cost of working on a project for a different client.

Of course, fan exclusivity in art is just one component of a project archetype. For instance, how do we account for the presence of characters in appear in situations designed by the artist, rather than the client? Do we really say that a character has exclusivity in a “your character here” auction, where the artist controls the direction of the picture? The answer is stakeholdership, an important part of an artist’s project archetype. Defining who gets creative control in a project is a vital determination.

Once a project is actually completed, we must also consider who gets to see the outcome--this is known as distribution. Artists distribute work publicly when the goal is to get as many eyeballs/customers as possible on a piece. Sometimes the client or artist wants only a few “whitelisted” people see the completed work, in which cause the piece is said to be privately distributed. In the case of porn sites or membership sites, art is privately distributed, as artists want as few outsiders as possible to see their work as an incentive to apply for membership.

So how do customers discover an artist or their work? This is where advertising comes in. For the sake of argument, I’m going to group advertising with marketing. Advertising is the process of acquiring new customers, and marketing is the process of getting customers to come back again. Where marketing money is spent, how much is spent, and the effectiveness of a mareting campaign all vary with the kind of work an artist does. For instance, if an artist has so much organic demand for work that their waiting list for commissions will span months, there is no need to spend money growing that list; an organically growing audience will keep that artist busy.

The purchasers of art can be divided into two camps: those who agree to pay before the project is complete, and those who agree to pay after. The first group is made up of clients (commissioners), who concentrate the cost of art and make it possible for some art to be released free of charge to the public. When people buy art after it is created (e.g. buying a CD), the cost is distributed among the many customers who purchase the work. This aspect of art is straightforward, but nonetheless significant.

What remains to be seen is exactly how the properties I have listed interact with each other. When I continue writing again, I will show how the above variables (exclusivity, stakeholdership, release, customer concentration, and advertising/marketing) combine differently as the project archetypes we see today in the furry community.