It’s unsatisfactory for the artist, because people don’t follow links, especially blind links. I can’t tell you how often I say something and link to the explanation / expansion / background, only to have many commenters ask perfectly basic questions that make it clear they didn’t follow the link.

It’s unsatisfactory for the reader, because a blind link (no matter what text accompanies it) doesn’t satisfy the visual interest or provide the most basic information necessary about whether to follow the link. When talking about the visual arts, only a sample (low res, sure, thumbnailed, sure, credited, sure, but it’s still got to be a visual sample) provides the reader with the info he/she needs.

And finally, it’s unsatisfactory for the blogger, because text is grey and most people want to see images when they are discussing image-rich topics. Blogging about an artist without including a sample of the work is like writing food reviews without any adjectives. You can do it, sure, but it’s stupid and pointless and a waste of everybody’s time.

1. Why not just link to the image? Same access, and the original artist is guaranteed attribution. I imagine that’s what he’s thinking folks ought to do.

2. Why doesn’t the original artist post a lower resolution version of his image on his website and then just say “to hell with it, if they want the real thing they’ll _have_ to pay me!

I visited an art gallery a few months ago, and there was only one section of the gallery that photos were allowed, and it was the oil paintings from the 1800’s. The modern work was restricted. I took pictures of the galleries, and some of the work, more as an aide to my own memory. I don’t have any plans to print these snapshots. But the pictures that were restricted from public photos, I neither remember, nor want to remember.

I don’t know if your customers can get your work in pure digital form. In many ways, this is even more scary for an artist. There is something comforting about selling a printed work, which is hard to copy, for some kind of profit. But from the customer’s point of view, this may not be very useful, nor their preferred medium.

Nobody is going to pay in the dollars range (even $1) for a wallpaper image for their computer, unless it is given more like a donation, to help the artist. Framing your need in a non-threatening way might help. “Please help support the artist” nudges digital consumers toward the real world faster than “Pay up or I’ll sue you.”

Usually i just comfort myself with the thought that the jpgs online will never look as good as my original paintings do in reality.

I’d like to take a moment to defend the right-click on Bondage Blog, though, since it emphatically has nothing in common with those horrid shrill “Don’t you dare copy this!” javascripts you see on the blogs of clueless people, except that it uses javascript.

First of all, the url of Bondage Blog images is right there in the code the popup offers you. Type or copy that url into your browser’s address bar, and you get the image on its own page for you to save to your heart’s content. Bondage Blog does not use any sort of anti-hotlink protection.

Obviously, that does add a few keystroke’s worth of inconvenience to folks who want to save the image, and for that, I apologize. But I am aiming to make it easier for the folks who want to hotlink the images on their own sites and forums, but who do not know how to craft the html that would let them do so in a socially acceptable way (i.e., with link credit, rather than just ganking my bandwidth). There are a LOT of these folks out there; this is the myspace generation.

At the end of the day, I gotta do something to justify my bandwidth bill. I hate anti-hotlink protection with a passion — I love this bondage stuff and I want people to be able to share it easily — so I had to try and do something. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for listening!

Rope Guy from Bondage Blog.

K.