To Artscape in Baltimore re: 2017 Artcars

Last year I had the worst experience I've ever had at an artshow with my car.  As Artscape decided it wasn't worth their time to reply or address any of the issues raised I've decided to share my letter to them with the world so that any artcar artist considering attending can know what to expect as far as treatment from Artscape. 

9-4-2017

Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts
10 E. Baltimore Street, 10th Floor
Baltimore, MD  21202

Artscape, BFAI, BOPA
Susan Fortkiewicz, Bill Gilmore, Bob Sicard, Chuck Adkins, Corey Lacey, David D. Mitchell, Kathleen Hornig, Kim Domanski, Krista Green, Linda Blume, Markell Cassard, Megan Bosse, Rosalind Healy, Shelia Goodwin, Tess Cooper, Tracy Baskerville, Anana Kambon, Michael Shecter, Jeffrey P. Pillas, E. Scott Johnson, William B. Gilmore, Kimberly A. Clark, Thomas Crawford, Michael Davenport, Shelia Y. Goodwin, Rosalind M. Healy, Sandy Hillman, Jack Lewin, Brian Lyles, Safa Ashrafi

Artscape@promotionandarts.com; tcooper@promotionandarts.org; SFortkiewicz@promotionandarts.org; tbaskerville@promotionandarts.org; sgoodwin@promotionandarts.org; rhealy@promotionandarts.org; MBosse@promotionandarts.org; MCassard@promotionandarts.org; lblume@promotionandarts.org; kdomanski@promotionandarts.org; khornig@promotionandarts.org; kgreen@promotionandarts.org; david.mitchell@promotionandarts.org; clacey@promotionandarts.org; bsicard@promotionandarts.org; CAdkins@promotionandarts.org; lblume@promotionandarts.org; SAshrafi@promotionandarts.org

Hello,

I’ve waited over a month to write this so that my thoughts would be clear and concise on this year’s Artscape Artcars exhibit.  Without a doubt it is the worst event I have ever attended.  Not only have I been going to Artscape for nearly a decade with my car but I also attend two to four other artcar events every year.  You failed in almost every way possible from the way you treated us artists to your failure to promote the artcar parade.  You not only failed us but you failed your vendors in a huge way.

We arrived at 11am on Friday to find one tent (not two per car as we were promised or even two for all the cars), with no furniture, no chairs, no table, no ice, no water, no soft drinks, zilch.  The heat index was over 107° and we were all expected to shelter from the sun in one 10’ square tent on a concrete overpass with no other shade of any kind!  We finally got some utterly crappy pizza dripping with grease (two choices!) after dark with about a dozen soft drinks in a bag.  Still no ice, no chairs, no table.  Unbelievable.  To top that off we were not allowed to leave until 11pm!!!  We are not statues, we’re not simple displays that can be set up and left behind.  We are artists, these are our vehicles, and 12 hours in the hot sun is ludicrous!  There was no reason whatsoever for us to remain there after 9pm either Friday or Saturday and why you forced us to is beyond me.  In the past we’ve been able to leave once it slowed down so we could do things like eat and sleep and recover from the heat.  You people don’t seem to understand that we use our cars to get home!  We can’t just leave them and walk, can we?  That seems to have been your attitude this year.

Saturday was perhaps where you screwed up the worst of all.  You didn’t advertise the artcar parade at all.  We were waving at the vendors sitting with empty booths on empty streets.  I’ve never seen it like that and it’s because you failed miserably.  In the process you really screwed over your vendors.  In the past the festival has been packed with people waiting for the parade and what did they do while they waited for it to start?  They shopped.  What did they do after the parade passed?  They shopped.  They simply weren’t there this year.  If I had a way to inform the vendors of this directly I would.  I would bet most of them saw a decline in their sales from past years, but I wonder if you people even care?  You seem not to have given a flying f*** about the artcar artists so why would you care about the vendors as long as they’re shelling out the bucks for booths?

We had to be at the AMA at 9am for this non-parade after being held prisoner until 11pm the night before.  Figure in an hour to get home, shower and eat and then an hour in the morning to get up and dressed and drive to the museum (even longer for some of the local artists who had a half hour drive) and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to recover from 12 hours in the blazing sun.  That also meant by the time we were finally released from that scorching hot bridge Saturday night at 11pm we had had a 14 hour day!  Dr. Bob, who has been bringing his beautiful vehicle to Artscape for 27 years is over 70 and you wouldn’t let him leave to go home.  You are monsters.  Again, there was no reason for us to stay there past 9pm.  None whatsoever.  We were just a spectacle for drunken dance party people to point at and shout, “Whoa!”  If we were just placing our cars there and leaving it would be no big deal but that’s not what any of us were doing and never has been.  You would know that if any of you cared to find out what you were doing.  We were suffering waiting for you and the cops to decide you could open up an exit for us.  It has never been this stupid any other year I’ve come to Artscape and I know one reason (other than the obvious incompetence of most if not all of you) is you didn’t have a single person dealing with the artcars that knew a thing about us, had any idea what we needed, had ever dealt with us in the past, or would have the slightest clue as to why your treatment of us was so crappy.

And let’s not forget your perennial bit of idiocy in requiring artcar artists to register in February for an event in late July.  Most of us don’t even know if our cars will be running that far in the future.  We’re not vendors, we’re a feature, though if you treat your vendors like you treated us this year I don’t see how you can rent a square inch of booth space.

If you seriously think that kind of treatment was worth the stipend we got to drive from Louisville Kentucky to Baltimore and suffer in the sun you’ve got another thing coming.  You don’t pay the local artists a damned penny and put them through this same BS.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard things like, “Oh great!  The artcars are back!  This is my favorite part of Artscape.  We missed you so much last year.”  But you people apparently have your heads so far up your own backsides you have no clue what a benefit we are to your festival or how beloved the artcars are.  Well frankly I doubt I’ll ever attend again after this year, not without firm assurances you’ll do a better job next time.

I know there are multiple pieces of custom built furniture for the artcar camp in storage.  I know you have a 25’ square tent that was bought specifically for the artcars.  Perhaps one of you could get off your ass and find them for next year.  Perhaps you could place the cars where they have an exit at a reasonable time instead of being locked in by the TSA and Baltimore police until hours after the vendors have closed up and gone home.  Perhaps you could provide refreshments the first day.  Perhaps you could bother to advertise the parade and actually make a parade out of it instead of a quick drive through the grounds to our parking spaces (seriously, in the past we’ve had marching bands, arted bicycles, and dancers, this year we hardly had to slow down there were so few people out there).  I write all this fearing none of you cares enough to even bother to read this far, much less do anything to improve your performance. 

Please respond to me promptly so I can decide whether or not to share this letter with every artcar artist in the country.  If you do understand how badly you screwed the pooch and make concrete efforts to do this thing right next year I’ll give you a chance in 2018 but I hold out little hope.  Regardless Artscape 2017 remains the absolute worst artcar event I’ve seen in this country in the dozen years I’ve been attending artcar shows.  There really is nothing anywhere in the same league of horribleness to compare you to.

Sincerely,

Alan 

p.s.  As you have no direct contact information for the BFAI board members I’m guessing they’re all too embarrassed to allow themselves to be publicly contacted.  I would appreciate it if you would make sure everyone on the above list gets a copy of this letter as they all took part in this travesty.

To the National Weather Service

Today the NWS decided to have a nationwide tornado drill... without doing shit to inform people it was going to happen, so I wrote them an e-mail:

What is wrong with you people?  You have the ability to text everyone in this country with a cell phone and let them know you're running a tornado drill.  You could also tell everyone with your app and put it on the weather.gov site and any number of dozens of places but you just set off the damned sirens and let people scramble to figure out what the hell is going on.  If it weren't for a friend that managed to dig it up online (and I do mean dig) I still wouldn't know why the hell the sirens went off.  Do you want people to just ignore them next time?  Like a growing number of Americans I don't have or want a television set and I only have a wind up radio in the house.  Even if you announced it on the weather radio (I'm going to bet you didn't) by the time I could've gotten the radio, wound it up, and started listening the sirens would've stopped.  How in the world was I supposed to find out what was going on quickly?  This is such a huge failure on your part you should all be fired and replaced.  You're the Office of Communications for fuck's sake, why don't you actually do that part of your job and communicate with us?
Alan Miller
Louisville KY

On “Pussy Hats”

    After the November election that put the Pussy Grabbin’ Donald Trump in office planning began for a women’s march in D.C. for his inauguration.  This became one of the largest and most peaceful demonstrations in history.  The “pussy hat” design was an inspired way of making a symbol for women to show they were part of the protest, even if they couldn’t be there (excellent story about the hats here).  By and large these hats are pink (usually a hot pink but also the kind of pale pink used stereotypically for female babies’ clothes and rooms) and feature a pair of cat ears.  They were originally knit but can now be found as straw hats with a variety of sized brims and can be purchased in many colors, including black, brown, white, and patterns.

    There is a wonderfully snarky brilliance to these hats that exists on many levels.  The stereotypical pink color, for instance, traditionally indicates weakness and a delicate state but on the heads of hundreds of thousands of marching women that color becomes a statement of strength and solidarity.  The wonderful double entendre of the word pussy refers not only to the crude word for vagina (crude enough you can’t call a vagina a pussy on the radio or television, for instance) but the ageless stereotype that women are cat-like (she’s being catty, they had a cat fight), thus the kitty ears.  The hats are an in-your-face rebuke of the patriarchy and anyone offended by equal rights for women.  At the anniversary march this January the pussy hats were everywhere and their statement was obvious.

    Well… obvious to most.  I have become aware there’s a movement of sorts among some trans women and women of color claiming these hats are offensive… to them!  Supposedly the pussy part of the name is offensive to trans women and the pink part is offensive to women of color.  This, ladies and gentlemen (and non-cis gendered people who don’t understand the term “ladies and gentlemen” refers to everyone but get their underwear in a wad over everything), is why the left is always going to get its ass beaten by the right:  They don’t destroy themselves trying to be more correct than everyone else in their group.  A tiny cadre of disgruntled people looking so hard for any new thing they can find to be outraged by turns on perhaps the single largest group of people who are on their side because they’ve managed to blindly and humorlessly pick at this symbol to find something to piss them off.  You’d think they’d have their hands full protesting the GOP and “men’s rights advocates” but no, they’re going to go after the most prominent symbol of the fight for women’s rights (which apparently everyone but this protesting minority understands means all women’s rights regardless of color or birth) over what are simply bullshit reasons.

    Let’s look at the “it’s offensive to trans women” argument first.  Because of the word pussy they are offended because… vagina?  First of all there is no vagina on that hat.  As I indicate above the word is a play on a vulgarity, but the actual object that vulgarity refers to is not on the hat.  The only way the name of the hat is exclusionary is if a trans woman decides she’s excluded by it, she’s not wearing a vagina on her heard if she wears it she’s wearing a pink hat with cat ears.  If she wears the damned thing she’s part of the movement, if she’s mortally offended by it then she is not part of the movement.  I think that’s pretty simple but apparently inventing reasons to be offended is extremely important to this tiny subset of a tiny group of trans women, but as is so often the case, the biggest assholes have the biggest mouths and, not wanting to offend anyone many people will not argue that their view is misguided at best and truly stupid at worse.

    How about the women of color argument?  That comes down to basically “because it’s pink I’m excluded.”  First of all, many women of color do have pink genitalia, and even those who do not have pink visible externally are pink inside, so there’s that, and if you strip the skin off any of us we’re fairly pink colored.  But more importantly if your vagina is the color pink most of those hats are you need to go to a doctor immediately, you’ve got some kind of serious inflammation going on.  Even if the hat is that powdery pink of a baby’s bedroom that is still not a real skin color and you should go get that looked at.  I don’t remember women of color losing their shit over the pink ribbons for breast cancer which were pink for exactly the same reason the pussy hats are pink:  it’s stereotypically feminine.  Again this seems to be the case of an extremely small number of very loud assholes making a weak case to support their need to be outraged by everything, consequences be damned.  Look at pictures of the Women’s March closely, there are an enormous number of women of color proudly wearing their hats.  Odd that they’re not outraged like this tiny bunch of sour spoilsports.

    The danger that lies in this kind of pointless division is the way it weakens and dilutes the entire women’s movement by causing internal friction over the most visible and unifying symbol the movement has ever had.  As long as there are people claiming they’re being excluded because of a hat they will exclude themselves, weakening the entire movement over petty nonsense.  The hats are funny, they’re immediately recognizable, the knit ones are warm and the straw ones shield the skin from the sun, and when hundreds of thousands of women take to the streets wearing them it is an incredibly powerful and inclusive statement.  It takes a very short sighted and self centered person to feel that a hat’s name and color excludes them.