Getting Paid

Today was about tallying up all the work sold at our artist collective booth at the fair. I took photos of all the sales sheets and posted them to the group chat so each artist could add up their own sales. I believed this would work out much better, since no one cares about your own work as much as you do, so each person would be more careful and accurate when adding up their own sales and sales tax. I also uploaded all the images into Claude A.I. and let it do the hard work of making a spreadsheet of items sold and the amount of money taken.

Claude A.I. had some issues and needed clarification on a few handwritten entries. So it asked questions, and we both double-checked. To work with A.I., be clear, and it may take some prompt engineering to get A.I. to do the task you asked. A.I., in my mind, is simply a computer doing math tricks in the background using rules and coding that people designed. I do not see it as an entity that is all-knowing. So many times I trust but verify. At times it is wrong based on the things it assumed rather than cross-checked. I learned early that I am the cross-check.

Each artist did quite well selling at the fair. The much smaller items sold far more than the more expensive, and some that did well last year did not do as well this year, and vice versa. Many times, it all depends on the type of crowd attending the fair and what each artist made, as some items were more popular than others. As we move forward, it is my idea to expand the collective to a few more people so that it sticks with my idea of artists picking themselves and, as a group, selling together where they may not have individually. It also helps split up the workload of working long hours at a booth.

I am really happy our little collective survived another year and that we were able to work through a few challenges and sell again together at the fair. At times when people work with people, tensions can arise, and we may even fight and bicker a little like family. However, as long as we are collaborating with each other to show our work to people who might care, the hardship is all worth it. The hard work for each artist is now completed for the most part, as they all made work and put in hours to show it to people who might care. Working out the payments and accounting is the easy part in my opinion.

If I were living yesterday a second time: I would have helped start this collective sooner.

Things I am grateful for: Showing work with other artists.

If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12,586 days left.

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