THE ARTISTIC REBUTTAL BOOK PROJECT got a little too big for our Tumblr britches, so we’ve made a new website to contain all the things we need. Head to www.artisticrebuttal.com for all the 2012 updates, a rebuttal gallery and to contact us about submitting a rebuttal this year! Thanks for all the follows!

The little sister of Director Amy Scheidegger’s long-time friend Neil Loughlin (of Lone Leaf Gallery), Dianna Loughlin, is bringing the Artistic Rebuttal Book Project to the mountains of North Carolina, in a BIG WAY.

She’s putting out a call for submissions around all of the Appalachian State University campus. She’ll be contacting members of multiple departments, including art, tech, literature, music, and theater, as well as the Arts Management Organization (AMO), the Student Art League (SAL), American Institute for Graphic Arts (AIGA), F-Stop (photography club in the technical dept), among others that correspond to literature, music, and theater.

Dianna even has the ASU Bookstore and Library willing to print the ARBP books in house and then wants to purchase copies of the final book product to keep on circulation in the library.

In her efforts to energize her city, Boone, NC about the project, not everyone is as enthusiastic … but there is light at the end of the tunnel:

A brief summary of her struggles and successes: The campus aspect of the project has been fairly easy to plan and handle. The downtown part, however, has been a challenge for me, but I can tell you this: we are having an Artistic Rebuttal Art Crawl!! :) I have contacted multiple organizations downtown, and we have 4 alternative exhibition spaces that will be showing rebuttals made by local artists. I have also made friends with the Watauga County Arts Council (WCAC), and they will be assisting me with keeping in touch with organizations downtown that are not able to exhibit work but want to be involved.

So there you go Ladies and Gents - the Artistic Rebuttal Book Project is taking western North Carolina by storm next year, and NONE of it would be possible without the tireless efforts and passion of Miss Dianna Loughlin … She is making her way, WORLD, Look Out!!

Dianna Loughlin is an Appalachian State senior from Greensboro, NC, double majoring in Studio Art and Art Management with a minor in Statistics.  She is the current curator of the Looking Glass Gallery in the Plemmons Student Union, and also works as a Gallery Assistant for the Catherine J. Smith Gallery in Farthing Auditorium. In the past, she has completed internships at both the Green Hill Center for NC Art and the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC and worked as a Gallery Assistant at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC.  Along with being an artist and student, Loughlin serves as Vice-President of the Arts Management Organization and assists with Life Drawing sessions offered by the Art Department.  After acquiring a BFA and BS at Appalachian, she aspires to attend graduate school to pursue a Masters in Fine Art.

We’re introducing a tiny trivia contest this week on our twitter feed and the winner will get a FREE COPY of the Artistic Rebuttal Book…stay tuned!!

If you don’t follow us yet, get on it! @ArtistRebuttal

What is it about artists that make people think we don’t want or deserve compensation for our work?

Is it because you think us bohemian vagrants with no home and no reason to keep up any form of personal hygiene? That we wear the same paint/clay/soiled clothes everyday without the desire to ever clean ourselves? Newsflash: We have homes, and rent to pay, along with the electric, gas, phone and internet bills just like any other schmo off the street. And GUESS WHAT: We kind of want to be able to buy toilet paper and laundry detergent and hand soap, too! Do you know what it’s like when you only have about three bathroom sessions left on your current toilet paper roll and you have no idea where the money is going to come from to buy more when you run out? It’s FUCKING SCARY man. (a 1st world horror, I know)

Do you think we eat out of dumpsters? Or do you think we all just eat out of the community garden, or the garden we have in our back yards? Well GUESS WHAT: some of us don’t have community gardens, and other of us HATE gardening because we are AWFUL at it. Some of us actually like strolling the isles of a proper grocery store in search of a good, hearty meal to make when we get back home (we haven’t paid the rent on it yet, of course). WHY DON’T YOU WANT US TO EAT? What have we ever done (other than everything you ask us to do without pay) to deserve your cold shoulder when it comes to a little chunk of change? Hell, we might even start settling for just the cost of materials so we can feel semi-appreciated (Christ, I’m starting to feel like Barack Obama in the middle of a debt crisis). And IT IS a crisis, mind you.

From now on, can we just pretend to look through our budgets and try to find some scraps of money to give the artists who give their EVERYTHING to the artwork that they produce? We’re not asking you to break the bank for us (they’re already broken, and it wasn’t an artist’s fault!) We’re asking only for a basic right: that if you like our work and need to borrow our talents, that we could exchange a bit of mutual respect (whoa whoa, not too much, our egos might inflate enormously) in the form of dollar dollar bills, the universal way of saying “thank you, good well done.”

So here’s some advice to all those wanting to use an artist’s ideas and skills but not wanting to fork over the cash: Put together SOMETHING to offer in exchange for a talent that many would LOVE to have, because if you keep asking for free shit, your organization is going to start LOOKING like you always ask for free shit. (Meaning: Artists are not above expressing their frustrations in the free art they hand over to you, and then you’ve wasted both your time, and theirs.)

—-Submitted by Pay Me, Jerks!