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Brickbats ...

From Jen Levert: "I have just finished looking at your works and I find this sort of blatant copying a little disturbing. I suppose I don't see the pupose of your work. I have no problem with artists appropriating works or pieces of work to make a point, but I feel that there isn't much of a point to your work. What are you trying to say? I agree that the works are very beautiful but I think they should be left to their own time period. This is almost grave-robbing. If you don't have anything to say to the world as an artist on your own merit then maybe you should wait until you do instead of pawning off beautiful, old prints as your own just because the original artists can't defend their right to it. Maybe you should be a historian instead. I'm sure you've gotten a lot of harsh criticism already and I am open to hearing your defence of your work."

From XXX XXX: "I'm just dropping you a quick note to say that I won't be continuing my subscription to your "Surimono" project for the coming year. To be honest, I was really sort of disappointed with the choice of subject matter for the year. I thought there must be a huge gulf between what you and I thought made a good print. That is, until I saw your offering for this month. What a great print! Almost made me sign up for another year, but I think I'll wait a bit. I'll check in with you next year and maybe we'll try this again. Best regards, ..."

From Frederick C.: "When I subscribed for the "Beauties of the Four Seasons" I was under the impression that all 4 prints would be in a classical ukiyo-e style. That was an assumption on my part and not necessarily any misrepresentation by you. I suppose my gut feeling has been that I don't like paying for something that I am not attracted to. I felt like I became a part of your personal psychological investigation. For me the 4 prints do not fit as a set. I love the first 3 but not the last one. I don't have a problem with the concept, or with representations of older women ( or older women in the flesh ! ) at all. Older women can be very beautiful in spirit and even physically. I just don't like the aesthetic of the last print. So I am going to send back two prints and pay you 14000 yen for the 2nd print. I just don't wish to pay for the other two prints."

From M.L.: "... I am sure a lot of people will bee in a situation similar to me. Your site is really hard to use. I dont remember how i saw the first time the "Crane at Sunrise", but it took me at least 40 minutes to find it again, going from page to page and looking around. I even remember reaching a page within your site where you could see most of the pieces along with inventory and information about the authors, but then i was completely unable to find it again. A lot of people will be put off because of this harsh experience, and that is a great diservice to the pieces you have in your store. Get someone to help you in this regard, to make the site easy to use to find and admire the works here. Specially since you will be having new people meeting your art, so that even more people can get to know it. Best of lucks!"

Dave's reponse: "Yes, it's chaos ... I know. It has of course simply grown organically bit by bit over a span of 15 years, beginning in 1997 (and some pages from 1997 are still in there!) At some point I am going to have to start with a clean slate and rebuild it all, but the job is so vast and would take so much time, that I simply cannot undertake it yet. As for the difficulty in finding the Crane print, did you try the Site Map that is linked from all the entry pages? That's what I use when I am trying to find anything!"

These were 'brickbats' ... there is of course a matching 'bouquets' section!



This 'baren' will always take you back
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