Democracy is awesome for government, but not so good for art. As this site registers more and more members, the percentage that are artists or designers can only dwindle.

Will this mean the folks who run Threadless will need to pick designs that go against the popular vote? probably.

As the site gets bigger, the preference of the public will only normalize tastes, or favor mediocre and tame submissions.

Let me give an example:

http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html

These are paintings created by Komar and Melamid based upon popular tastes.

The best painting of the web is my favorite:

http://www.diacenter.org/km/web/most.html


I'm sure I'll be taken to task for bringing this all up, but let me just leave you with a question:

Do you think your favorite band or singer would ever stand a chance in hell on American Idol?

I'm leaving you forever. Or a couple months. We'll see.

Love,

Robert

its over there, on the left.

http://threadless.com/submission/39885/nanoshirt

check out my shirt. not because i want you to vote for it, i could really care less at this point. i thought it was kind of cheeky but some people have really strong feelings about it.

i don't think i've seen people so passionately divided on something since the election.

personally, i made the design as a joke. i'd probably give it a 2, but i thought people might get a laugh out of it anyway. instead, there has been some serious vitriol. sheesh.

what the hell! i compress my Gif's using ImageReady, I can view them on my own personal blog and yet everytime i load them up for Threadless, its seems like every damn submission has severe artifacting that didnt exist when it was originally compressed and previewed. i know that flash would be a nice way to circumvent this, but i don't have it so does anyone have a good idea for settings on the dither or number of colors of something to make the GIFS decent?

Why are there all these shirts about the future? where am i? what's going on?

I'm not the only one who notices it either! There are way too many denizens of threadless who are absolutely clueless to the Blank Loves Threadless competitions.

I'd like to just dismiss it to the fact that they all have ADD or that they're idiots, but that seems unfair.

Maybe the problem is that Banners above contest entries are too small and not noticable. There is a problem with the interface design.

People are dismissing the notice as a peripheral piece of info, like a pop-up ad, and ignoring it. then they write comments about how they are sick of seeing a shirt that says, for instance 'I saw the Future.'

Maybe if they weren't so annoyed, they might give a shirt a 4 instead of a 0. It's possible.

Anyways, Threadless meisters, if you are out there, either require contest entries to be watermarked with a big Loves Threadless tag or create runnings for these shirts that are not mixed in with the regular ongoing contest.

Let's seperate contests to avoid confusion. Just be sure to make the ads on the front page noticable.


Thanks,
Robert

if anyone who runs the site happens to read this, i just accidentally refreshed my submission page after it crashed, thereby causing it to submit twice. sorry.

are up!

is the pic you see on the left. submitted it the other day. look for it soon.

are finally up! i love those crazy kids.