An artist has said it felt “infuriating” to discover “hundreds” of items featuring her work for sale on an online marketplace without her permission.
Jenny Urquhart, 49, from Bristol, decided to visit Temu after reading a recent BBC report about card firms complaining about rip-off greeting cards being available for sale on the website.
She said she found “pages and pages” of items using her designs, including men’s underwear, cushions and car mats. “You think of a gift item and I’d find one of my images printed on it,” added Mrs Urquhart.
A spokesperson for Temu said the company had immediately removed the listings in question when it was made aware of the situation.
[…]
“It’s really hard at the moment to make money out of art because quite rightly buying art comes well below obviously, paying the mortgage, buying food, paying the bills,” she said.
"At the moment we’re really struggling. As soon as I get an order on my website I’m overjoyed - every single sale counts.
“To think there’s some multi-million pound business on the other side of the world just flogging your stuff. It’s completely out of your control and infuriating.”
[…]
The headline had me wondering what she was doing looking for work on a building site instead of being an artist.
This wouldn’t matter so much if 1) Arts Council funding hadn’t been decimated under austerity and 2) Working class people could afford to buy art.
The pool of people who can afford to keep the arts alive is rapidly diminishing. I work with artists and see this week in week out but it’s the same with everything.
Rich man moves to the village and everyone goes to work for him.
Temu are stealing her work and profiting from it. It matters - clearly there are a bunch of people who can afford to keep art alive who are spending their money at Temu rather than with her. Sort that out - currently it’s pretty much a risk free crime for the third party seller- and then art can be less dependent on public spending and thus more robust
Isn’t Temu just a bunch of shady Chinese resellers in a trenchcoat like Amazon?
Temu sell it for just over the cost of production, while the artist sells it with a high mark up, there’s a difference in affordability.
Well, kinda. Their cost of production is lower partly because they don’t have to pay an artist enough to feed themselves. Your costs are always lower when you don’t pay for stuff that those playing by the rules do.
Art takes time, money and creativity to make. Of course that’s going to be more expensive than downloading something someone else made and printing it out. Accounting for the time and costs that go into making art isn’t a high markup, it’s being paid for your labour.
As a working class person who can’t afford art and has always pirates everything this is accurate.
Just a few small questions, out of interest - would you buy art if it was significantly cheaper, or free? Or would it just be so low on your priority list that it would never be important enough?
If it was very cheap, or free, would you take “whatever was on offer”, or would you still have very particular tastes in what you liked?
It’s too low on the priority list. Rent, bills, food etc. all come first.
I only buy e.g. video games that are exceptionally enjoyable and exceptionally niche or an album on bandcamp of an artist who’s work I particularly enjoy with exceptionally few plays where 1 sale might make a difference, and even then I usually limit any such spend in total to a max of £20 at most, and it’s something I would only spend once a month at most, normally rarer.
Higher prices are a deterrent.
For instance when I was trying to leave Spotify, I had no good piracy sources for one of the albums from my Spotify library, so I went to the artist’s page on bandcamp and it was priced at £12 or something as minimum, when she was some indie Lana del Rey type “moan to a synth a bit” and it was nothing special, just decent vocals. Long story short I just shrugged, removed the song from my playlists both on Spotify and locally and now I no longer remember who the artist in question was, I instead bought the entire discography of a different, more unique artist at £2 per album.
As for like, drawings/paintings, I intrinsically see them as having almost zero value and cannot see myself ever paying for one, I would sooner invest in a printer and print something off Google images for a poster than anything else If I even could put up posters without running afoul of the rental agreement. On an emotional level - when I grew up, all images were just something on the internet that was free, watermarks and Shutterstock meant to prevent you from right clicking and saving an image and all that crap to me are seen as enshittification.
I would definitely never buy art for art’s sake, it would be highly specific things. Out of all the people I know IRL, I’m basically the only one who considers paying for art generally, which probably has something to do with the fact I’m sympathetic because I’m a hobbyist musician. In fact most people I know don’t even seem to have the attention span for music at all anymore, they just don’t listen to any music at all (which isn’t my fault I swear lol).
This wouldn’t matter …
It always matters. Temu simply stealing the work of others. Temu is the one which exploits others, not the Arts Council or austerity.
And those who benefit from sales on Temu are among the wealthiest globally.
I didn’t say it wouldn’t matter. I said it wouldn’t matter as much.
Wait, british goebbles, you forgot to include “china bad” in the headline!
