Sharing Fanart

==The Print Era==
In the days before fan art on the internet, sharing of fan art was limited to photocopies and the occasional print run. The steep costs of reproduction and low production quality available meant that the redistribution of fan art, both authorized and unauthorized, was highly restricted. Many fan artists relied upon these technological hurdles to stabilize the prices of both their original art as well as their art print runs. To see fan art you either had to buy the zine, borrow a copy of the zine, or spend money to attend a convention where the art was displayed. Both original art and fan art prints were sold at conventions, either in art shows or at art auctions, often fetching prices of hundreds of dollars each.A Suzan Lovett MUNCLE art piece sold for over $400 at the 1994 Zebracon art auction. In 2003, Suzan's art used on the cover of Timeless sold for $3,000. Not all the pieces that sold for a high price were originals, however. Even art prints could command high prices. At the 1997 MediaWest art auction Suzan sold multiple Professionals art prints for $300-$500 each. A print that sold for $95 at the same convention was considered to be a bargain. Source: Morgan Dawn's personal notes, accessed May 25, 2012. This limited supply and exposure meant that due to art's visual medium, LOCs and discussions of fan art were infrequent when compared to the printed word: In 1994, fans on the Virgule-L attempted to discuss a Suzan Lovett drawing. The problem was that the description was so generic and covered so many Lovett's drawings that the discussions devolved into a "who's on first" debate as fans attempted to identify the drawing and whether it had appeared in a zine or at an art show. The art piece was only described as "Avon & Blake wrapped around each other, emotional stuff everywhere, complete and total nudity with no penises displayed." As a result art was rarely discussed on Virgule-L. Source: Morgan Dawn's personal notes, accessed June 11, 2013. 
One fan in the 1990s compared the reproduction of fan art to the reproduction of fanzines:
Even as flat-bed scanners became more affordable in the mid 1990s, as more and more fans uploaded fan art on email and mailing lists. The digital exchange of fan art was acceptable Fans could not see the value of buying a digital scan they could not display on a wall, and artists worried that the free distribution of fan art would impact its marketability. Also, many fan artists worried about the legal ramifications of seeing their fan art widely available online. And last, at least in the early days of the World Wide Web, limited graphical display software and low modem connection speeds meant that it was often impractical to view fan art online.
This still did not prevent fans from sharing fan art. For example in 1996, Suzan Lovett learned that someone was mailing a floppy disk to other fans that contained two scans of her artwork. This news was then immediately exaggerated into CD-ROMs being shared with dozens of scans and then later into Suzan's artwork being uploaded to the Internet - neither of which were true. Suzan then threatened to pull all her art print sales from fandom, and instead focus only on commissioned fan art. However, as one fan pointed out, the mass cross-posting of Suzan's complaints to multiple mailing lists raised the possibility, in many fans minds, that one could share fan art.Source: Morgan Dawn's notes of discussions taking place in 1996. 
The Lovett incident did not take place in isolation. Earlier in 1994 one fan pointed out that as long as fandom treated art as a scarce resource, it could, eventually, led to widespread sharing.
==Fan Art Online==
By the early and mid 2000s, more and more fan art began to appear on various websites such as the artist's website and fan archives, and with the adoption of personal blogging, more and more fan artists began displaying their fan art online in their own personal spaces. At the same time, art software came down in price, which led more and more fan artists to switch to the new digital medium. Without the fanzine publisher or convention art show as an intermediary, fan artists could, for the first time, communicate directly with their fan audience and get feedback about their fan art.
With the new technology and direct lines of communication, came additional problems, namely controlling access and limiting distribution of fan art. The old methods (limited print runs, difficult reproduction) no longer constrained fandom. Still, there was an understanding, for many years, that reposting or sharing fan art without permission was not something to be done within media fandom. insert note about different traditions in anime and manga fandoms. This did not stop fans from continuing to share fan art as before under the table or via private mailing lists. The taboo, one fan admitted, was "not that copying and sharing was being done. The taboo was in admitting it was done. As if the mere admission of the fact was tacit permission."Morgan Dawn's personal notes of conversations with fans in the 1990s, accessed June 11, 2013.
==Social Networking and Embedding Brings New Challenges==
Social networking in the mid 2000s began to erode some of these prohibitions against sharing fan art. This erosion did not take place over night and was by no means uniform. For example, on some fan art review blogs, fan were discouraged from reproducing the fan art they were reviewing -- instead they could only link back to the original or provide an extremely cropped version of the art as a teaser preview. post at fanart-recs dated July 25, 2011. Yet, at the same time, fan artists began moving to even more open fan art platforms like DeviantArt that allowed embedding of their fan art into other blogs and websites. This created a cognitive dissonance in fandom that is still ongoing -- while the artists' chosen platform allowed reproduction, many members in the fandom community frowned on the use of those technological tools. In the late 2000s, a large portion of media fandom migrated to Tumblr, which was designed around the endless 'reblogging' of photos and images. Subtle nuances began to creep into the fan art sharing discussions, usually centered on technological aspects that often had little to do with fandom and more with the tools of the social platforms itself. For example, on Tumblr, "reblogging" was good, and "reposting" was bad. In January 2013, a was started to discourage the practice of "stealing" gifs by reposting (i.e. downloading and then uploading to start a new chain of reblogs) instead of reblogging. See the fail_fandomanon . See also the and the the on tumblr (accessed June 14, 2011). Additional campaigns took place against a Supernatural art Facebook group in June of 2013. See dated June 11, 2013. The latter campaign resulted in the Facebook group agreeing to credit and/or remove art upon artist request. This is because on Tumblr, reblogging allowed the original poster to see the number of reblogs along with the subsequent comments, whereas reposts, even with a link back to the artist's tumblr, did not 'count' towards their fandom popularity."The single biggest piece of etiquette would be not to strip out your sources. Reblogs with the automatic links back to the Tumblr where you found it are cool, stripping out those links is uncool. If you're posting something cool you found on Pixiv or DA or whatever, link back to the original source...." Source: in a fail-fandomanon post about Tumblr etiquette, dated March 4, 2012. And of course, many fan artists were not on tumblr at all, which meant that how their fanart was received the community was invisible to them. These fine distinctions would have been incomprehensible to the fan artists of just a few decades earlier.
Complicating matters is that, even among fan artists, there is no uniformity of opinion regarding sharing, authorized or unauthorized, of fan art.
Some fan artists can be very specific as to what they will - and will not allow. The permutations are endless, often contradictory and changing, leaving many fans confused as to what is "acceptable". Here, this fan artist asks fans to not "distribute" her art but in a later comment indicates they can embed her art or reblog it using only certain methods on certain platforms:
Interestingly, the prohibitions against reposting or embedding (vs reblogging which is a tumblr specific tool) indicates that even sharing with proper credit is unacceptable to some fans. In this quote there is also an elevation of the fan creator at the expense of the non-creator with its emphasis that sharing "cheapens the community." This approach seems to be at odds with fandom's preferred social media platforms built on re-blogging, re-tweeting and otherwise automatic tools used for sharing the art, posts, and words of others:
Still, in spite of these mixed messages, there are some who see value in sharing fan art, arguing that is increases the fan art's value, rather than reducing the fan artist's 'currency': 
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Another fan points out that: 
Yet even here on the topic of fandom currency, fandom opinion is not uniform. For a completely different take on the 'Online Fanart Protection Manifesto' created on behalf of Japanese fan artists read dated Dec 22, 2009. And for yet a third, middle of the road opinion, read dated August 4, 2009.
In 2015, one popular fan artist attempted to inject some practicality into the ongoing discussion of how to share fanart. Responding to a new fan artist who was worried about posting her artwork online, she explained:
==References==
Category:Fanwork Sharing
Category:Discussion
Category:Visual Art