Licensing Show: Today's Tally

Today's tally isn't going to be good. It's all artists. The show has been slow as hell. Going back to my earlier post, I'll finish my categories...

Fans: Fans are people who already know my work. It would be great if they were also art buyers with big budgets, but my fans aren't people who have jobs. Fans hang around and make it impossible for art buyers to enter the booth to do business. Fans, please come to see me at my book signings and at comics shows.

Menu Men: The men who drop off menus for Chinese restaurants. On the last day all the jobbers come around trying to get logistics business.

Losers: The Licensing Show lets anybody in, there's no need to provide identification, there's no qualifying of attendees. The badges aren't coded in any way to let you know if you're talking to a real journalist or art buyer, or just some disability case killing another one of his endless string of free afternoons.

Losers will come into your booth and plop down in the chair you're renting for $100 a minute, open up their egg salad sandwich, take a bite, then proceed to spit little chunks of all over your portfolio, table, carpet, and samples, as they recount the long, sad story of their life. Losers are tactile. They pick up every item you have on display and set it down with a gummy smudge. They like to touch. Some losers will have that kind of bitter edge too, where they simultaneously fawn over you and berate you for doing everything all wrong. If you become annoyed they take pleasure in the negative attention.

The loser reduces the curb appeal of your booth by 95%. As the clown is trying to impress you with everything he has done and all that he knows, the corporate suits with massive budgets stream by. Losers park themselves in your booth during the heaviest traffic. Your exhibit is blighted. You will say, "thanks for dropping by," as you scoot them off on their way, but they'll ignore it and find some other reason to linger for fifteen or twenty minutes. I had one like that today, he said that he was an artist's representative.

Some loser identifiers: he used to be an artist himself and wants to get back into it, he's an inventor of something he can't tell you about because it's so amazing that everyone would want to steal it, he has a project in development that you would be perfect for, he hasn't been doing his art because he's been ill, he's in the process of getting new business cards and his website is undergoing a redesign.