Date: 2009-07-08 23:05 Subject: Anime Expo Security: Public

So last week I went to Anime Expo for the first time in like 4-5 years and i was kinda disappointed. Well I only went because my company had a booth there and I had to work - which was fine, we had the biggest booth there which was kinda halarious.

I used to remember my favorite part of the expo being the artist alley - being able to see people just sketching was very invigorating to me. Of course that was before I went to Comiket in Japan. So I wander on over to the artist alley this time around and I am just ... dumfounded by the sheer amount of shit out there. I understand AX is a fan convention, but honestly 90% of the "artists" there were people whose work amounted to little more than doodles, yet they were still there displaying their work charging just as much as an actual "good" artist next to them. It was actually pretty disgusting to me. I can hear all the bla bla bla about how art is subjective, but there is a level of technique that is readily apparently no matter what you are looking at. Especially with a genre so commercialized, a certain level of technical expertise is necessary to produce a piece that is sellable.

And this junk I saw everywhere was just so nauseating to me because it sort of sums up how I've felt about these cross cultural misappropriations. When I was in Japan and saw how foreigners were applauded because they could utter a few meager words of Japanese, and in turn they in their mind suddenly become some cross-cultural super star - it was pretty much the same situation here except the people were exponentially much more diluted. They shit out some vague idea of what they think "art" is, but they think they're awesome at it because it's a 'foreign' art form and that haphazardly pronounced "konnichiwa" was what I saw being sold for $10 a print.

/jaded