Throughout the 5 years that the Waste Your Life. Be An Artist. campaign has been running, the website has gone through some pretty major overhauls (mostly based around my continued learning of basic HTML) but, at the basic level, no matter how pretty I managed to make it, it really just amounted to a portal for shirt sales. With all the positive response I've received from so many people over the years, I've wanted to add more in general, but most ideas never panned out, or just stagnated.
After starting up a Facebook page for the campaign(during the great Myspace Exodus of 09), I started posting artist & art related articles to the stream that I found interesting. After awhile, it seemed that a lot got a decent amount of response and people generally liked what was going up. Beyond that, I found myself enjoying the act of spreading this information, to people who may otherwise have not seen it, more & more enjoyable. I started making it at least a weekly habit & signed my wife Tami (director of the Avant Arts Collective here in Vegas, by the way :) ) on as an admin to help by posting things she may come across as well. The real sticking point with social networks in general, especially Facebook, though, is that you can really come across as "spammy" if you post too often (whether as a person or "organization") and it's very easy to get people turned off to what you are trying to do, like just give them a chance to see some neat stuff. So we started running into roadblocks with finding things we found interesting, but not wanting to over-post. You can see where this is going...
It only made sense, with where we are at this point & what the two of us enjoy, to make one more (this would be the 6th or 7th overhaul) change & go into full on blog mode. Shirts and stickers are still available of course, but it’s far from the singular focus of the site or campaign (I never really wanted it to just be about merch anyway).Some of the longer standing fans may have noticed we moved to a new domain, with the full Waste Your Life . Be An Artist. title as well. We’ll be keeping the facebook posts to a weekly basis, if you’re a fan over there (or would like to become one) so as to not inundate everyone. We’ll be trying to post here daily or at least every couples days interesting things throughout the art world, local information on things we are involved with and general neat stuff with the occasional personal message, such as this one. Follow, RSS, or just check back on the regular.
Post 1 down. Thanks for your interest & support.
Cheers
Scott R. Wood
