How naïve we all are, toiling to make our own works of art. The trick is to think up a cool concept, hire someone to photograph it for us and sell it for $100K. Brilliant.
www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/arts/design/01zhou.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
As the artist in this article says, "From the beginning I knew I'd be successful. It's really not that hard to create art."
Mark McCarvill
The miracles of creative art lie not in particular materials and methods, but in the basic concepts involved. – Ansel Adams
Do you call him an artist???
a lot of people just have "the ideas'" and direct others to do the work for them ...
he's like an art director in an ad agency
It's just what Getty and Corbis are doing to the stock photo industy. They track the trends and what is selling well, then they use a handful of contract photographers to do similar photos for their royalty free and rights managed divisions.
Instead of 10,000 photographers making $5,000 to $100,000 per year from stock photography, now 10 photographers get paid $100,000 per year to shoot stock full-time, while the other 9,990 photographers make $0 to $5,000 from their stock.
(Note to the petty: these are guesstimates made as an example. Getty and Corbis don't tell us the numbers.)
Looks like he's the Chinese version of Thomas Kincade...
Brian Vuillemenot
Very little that comes out of China is original and this is just something else that you can add to the list. Mark Kostabi did this same exact thing here in NYC about twenty years ago. He put an ad in the NY Times looking for painters and then put them to work. He made a lot of money. It was the same time that Jeff Koonts was getting famous. They were fierce competitors and they hated eachother.
I've worked for both Corbis and Getty and I don't particularly like them but they did manage to come up with a business model that proved very successful. The days of photographers dumping their life's work on the doorsteps of Stock Agencies are over. It's all about being selective and not just gathering together millions of photos with the hope that the law of averages kicks in eventually.
There are small, lean and mean stock agencies out there now that have been started by photographers and others who were willing to take control of their careers. If you want a retirement fund get into a good IRA because Getty and Corbis just aren't going to do it for you.
"How naïve we all are, toiling to make our own works of art. The trick is to think up a cool concept, hire someone to photograph it for us and sell it for $100K. Brilliant. "
Just like Gregory Colbert.
Sounds exactly like the reactions Warhol got way back in the day...! It's not REALLY different, now, is it?
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