The difference in attitudes to fanart and fanfic
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| Title: | The difference in attitudes to fanart and fanfic |
| Creator: | alias-sqbr |
| Date(s): | 10 November, 2010 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | SF |
| Topic: | attitudes to fanart in fandom and the professional art world |
| External Links: | Dreamwidth, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The difference in attitudes to fanart and fanfic is an essay on fanart by alias-sqbr.
Excerpts
General meta about fanworks tends to be written by fanfic writers(*), and I often get a squidgy feeling of "that's not right" when I try and apply their conclusions/assumptions to fanart. [...]Some major differences that jump out at me:
- a) A lot of successful artists openly draw fanart as fanart, but few successful writers will openly share their fanfic unless they call it a "postmodern pastiche" or something.
- b) It's considered more acceptable to show creators fanart of their work than fanfic.
- (b) There are many examples of fanartists being hired as commercial artists based on their fanart, but I don't know of anyone getting a writing gig directly via fanfic (though I wouldn't be entirely surprised, I know people have gone from fanfic to official spin off novels) EDIT: Two counterexamples so far in the dw comments. I get the impression it is still rarer for fanfic, but maybe not!
- c) Lots of fanartists openly sell fanart and do fanart commissions of copyrighted works, while selling fanfic is usually considered unethical and dangerous. (Opinions on the legality of both differ wildly, I'm not sure of any consensus in either case)
But while there is a distinction between fanart and "real" Art, it's a much more complicated continuum. On one end is fanart, in the middle there's graphic design, comics and illustration, which are the bulk of the modern art we see in everyday life(**), and at the fair end there's Fine Art, an esoteric discipline that most people have little contact with or interest in. Consider the number of places you can buy newly published Literature versus the places you can buy newly created Art.
Emily Carroll Classes It Up In Her 'BioShock' and 'Mass Effect' Artwork, in which a comics blog promotes the fanart of a webcomic artist as "classy". It's also notable that the blog seems to classify Marvel/DC and webcomics etc as all just "comics". I can't imagine a prose focussed blog blurring those boundaries so much, at least not with serious fanworks of copyrighted works (though they might post silly crack fanfic, a fairytale retelling, or an original short story by a random blogger)