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The front page of deviantART- The title of this article is shown beginning with a capital letter due to technical restrictions. The correct title is deviantART.
deviantART is a popular online artistic community. It was first launched on August 7, 2000 by Scott Jarkoff and Matthew Stephens.
Angelo Sotira is the current CEO.
deviantART aims to provide a place for any artist to exhibit and discuss his or her artworks. It also provides a community of like-minded individuals. The site consists of over 1.5 million users and over 16 million submissions (as of 2005).
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Terminology
The site makes esoteric use of the style of its title, deviantART, by playing on the lowercaseUPPERCASE formula, and relating all facets of the site to deviancy. As such, the following terms are used ubiquitously throughout the site:
- dA — frequent abbreviation for the site's title.
- dAmn - abreviation of the deviantART message network.
- Deviant — a user of deviantART.
- Deviation — every submitted piece of artwork is called a Deviation, so long as it is declared by the artist (Deviant) to be fully polished and in a state for exhibition. If not, the work is a Scrap (an unfinished work, not exhibited prominently).
Artforms
Visual art which can be digitized in any way may be uploaded onto the site, although videos and audio files are a form not allowed. The main categories of art on the site are:
- Artisan Crafts
- Cell Phone Art
- Community Marketplace
- Contests
- Current Events
- Designs & Interfaces
- deviantART Related
- Digital Art
- Flash
- Handhelds
- Icons
- Modules & Plugins
- Photography
- Poetry
- Prose
- Resources
- Scraps
- Screenshots
- Skins & Themes
- Stock photography
- Traditional Art
- Visualization Presets
- Wallpaper
If a subcategory is missing and viable, it is usually added.
Features
Besides the basic features of an online artistic community, deviantART also incorporates:
- Several Forums
- A Shoutbox, and a chatting feature called dAmn (deviantART Messaging Network)
- A private messaging service. Private messages are called 'Notes'.
- The ability to enter your longitude and latitude, by which to locate deviants who live close to you.
- Every deviant has his or her own personal page at the URL http://foo.deviantart.com, where foo is replaced by the username of the deviant in question. This page may list the deviant's interests, mood, hobbies and so forth. It also exhibits the deviant's most prized work, his or her recent works, and his or her Favourites.
- Each deviant can their own public journal. The journal is a blogike feature, whereby a deviant may write an entry and it'll be displayed on the deviant's user page. However, no feature which restricts certain posts from being seen by the general public has been implimented.
- Any deviant may add any other deviant to a watchlist called deviantWATCH. Doing so will cause them to be notified every time anyone on their watch list submits a new piece of art. One can also elect to be notified of the submission of scraps or journals.
- Any deviant may select any other deviation as one of their 'Favourites'. This will place the deviation on that user's personal page, giving the original artist extra exposure.
- One may also buy themselves a Prints account, whereby they may sell their works for money, recieving 50% of the sale price.
- There is also an adCast program, for advertising art- and community-related products/pages at a discounted rate.
Obtaining a subscription to the site unlocks enhancements to these features, as well as provide additional services.
Growth
The site is in a constant state of growth, and features continue to improve and increase in number. There is a forum specifically focused on suggestions, and another for reparing known problems. In the past, a monthly magazine called devMAG was produced, but this was discontinued.
deviantART's current revision (deviantART v4, or Fournando), was released on August 7, 2004, (deviantART's fourth anniversary).
Subscription
deviantART maintains a subscription based service that offers extra features and privilages.
Some of these subscriber-restricted features are:
- Advertisement-free browsing.
- Greater customisation of a user's personal page.
- deviantMOBILE - the feature to download any (agreed) deviation to one's mobile phone, by a supported mobile phone carrier.
- Private forums.
- Faster surfing.
- Ability to alter the size of thumbnails used when browsing deviations.
- An opportunity to become a beta tester and try out new features.
User Symbols
All deviants on deviantART are referred to by their given nickname, which is preceded by a user symbol. The symbols are listed below.
- ~ Member (the level a deviant achieves by registering)
- * Subscriber (one who pays a subscription)
- = Official Beta Tester (a subscriber who participates in the beta testing program)
- ` Senior Member (a member recognized by staff as a positive contributor to the deviantART community. Also, former staff typically receive senior membership)
- ° Alumni Staff (Former Core Staff Member)
- @ dAmn/Shoutbox Staff
- : Premium Content Staff
- © Policy Enforcement Staff
- % deviantART Prints Staff
- + General Staff
- ¢ Creative Staff
- ^ Gallery Directors
- $ Core Administrators
- ! Banned User
Origins
The idea of a deviantART community, though inspired by other projects such as screenphuck.com, customize.org and skinz.org, which were all application skin based websites, was thoroughly original in nature.
"Fella", a small horned character, was chosen as the official deviantART mascot, while a stylized "dA" was used as the logo.
The deviantART website was established in August 2000. A legal issue is still pending about who are the founders (please, see the section "Termination of Scott Jarkoff" below.
deviantART Shop
This service was formerly known as deviantART Prints, and before that, deviantPrints. Formally a secondary website that acts as deviantART's store, is totally integrated with deviantART.com. Here, any user who has bought a Prints account may sell their deviations, printed onto a variety of media. One may also sell Prints without such an account, but will only receive 10% of the revenues instead of 50% of the profits; some members have protested over such a policy.
deviantART Summit
The Hollywood Palladium while hosting the first annual deviantART Summit.On June 17 and June 18, 2005, deviantART held their first convention, the deviantART Summit, at the Palladium in Hollywood, California. The summit consisted of several exhibitions by numerous artists, including artscene groups old and new at approximately 200 different booths. Giant projection screens displayed artwork as it was being submitted live to deviantart.com, which receives 30,000 new images daily. The summit also hosted various art-related workshops and seminars. Leaders of deviantART hope to hold a new summit each year.
Criticism
- Stop!
The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please view the article's talk page.
deviantART as a Corporation
In April 2003, deviantART was revealed to have been a for-profit corporation from its inception (instead of having started out as a volunteer made website such as Elfwood).
Over the years, the website has grown so much that several features available to non-subscribers have been removed. These removals have been explained as both an encouragement for members to subscribe (such as the ability to view artwork thumbnails in a user's message center) and due to cutbacks that had to be made to save bandwidth during the "bandwidth-crisis" that happened in DeviantART's second year.
Termination of Scott Jarkoff
Problems and uproars are linked even to this apparently simple question: Who founded deviantART? According to Scott Jarkoff, Matt Stephens and himself are the only founders. According to other sources, the idea of deviantART sprouted in mid 1999, originally a solution to the need for a skin section on a site called DMusic, run by Angelo Sotira. Jarkoff was the mastermind, and pitched the idea to Sotira, the idea of a website where users could submit and share their custom skins. Sotira approved of the idea, and Jarkoff began work. Soon Stephens became involved, when Jarkoff showed him his design ideas. Stephens suggested the site be open to all forms of visual artwork, instead of just skins. Together they brainstormed and coded, and the site opened on August 7, 2000. While Sotira was not a large part of the community until 2002, his initial involvement led him to claim he was also originally the third co-founder, a claim refuted by Jarkoff and Stephens. Anyway, it is important to notice that Scott Jarkoff, aka jark, wrote in his staff bio this: "It was myself, `matteo and $spyed that founded deviantART back in the summer of 2000. At the time $spyed and I were working together on DMusic and we were trying to come up with ideas for a skinning section for all the MP3 related software. After doing some soul searching I came up with the name deviantART and the idea of branding submissions as deviations and users as deviants. `matteo joined in the fray and we chose to make deviantART a complete art site from the onset. Of course that is an extremely concise representation of what took place in order to get deviantART launched and off the ground.", as you can read here 1. If you read the comment made now by jark to his own past words, you can see that he does not say at all that that staff bio exerpt is false, but simply that he wrote it that way because he had to do so. (see here 2).
On July 29, 2005, Scott Jarkoff (who goes by °jark at deviantART) was terminated from deviantART staff, causing what many would call an uproar within the community. Many of them believe that his firing was unwarranted. Various defenses by deviantART regarding the issue have attempted to portray his termination as necessary, but much of the user base rejects this assertion. With Matthew Stephens' resignation in 2003, supporters of Scott Jarkoff claim that now neither of the "two founders" remain in deviantART's administration. In contrast, Angelo Sotira (who goes by $spyed at deviantART) insists he was a founder, and also the first full time working staff member of the deviantART administration. The deviantART administration has been accused of being generally tight-lipped throughout the incident due to legal restraints.
Various campaigns have sprung up in support of Scott Jarkoff, including the "Bring Back The Community" campaign and "Yellow Day" (because Jarkoff was sometimes known as the "Yellow Alien"), which was carried out by many of Scott Jarkoff's supporters on deviantART's fifth anniversary, August 7, 2005.
On July 31, 2005, Sotira posted an official response in an attempt to explain the situation. The response to this entry was mixed.
Copyright Issues
Historically there have been several rumours regarding deviantART's usage of uploaded art. deviantART staff members emanated a message about such concerns. However, some members are still not appeased, as the license agreement (which can be read here) is still the same. This agreement - emanated during jark's administration of the site, well before jark's termination - grants deviantART the right to re-use and even modify any artwork posted on deviantART (see in particular "AGREEMENT 3.License" section), as well as the right to sublicense to any third party any artwork on deviantART (see "3.d" section).
Also, the immense popularity of the site has made it an easy target for copyright violation, as a malicious user can easily reuse artwork displayed (usually as clip art for websites) without the author's knowledge. Also, many users either ignorant of the site's purpose or the site's submission agreement often submit art works they did not produce. Others attempt to use deviantART as a photo-hosting site for their own needs, which is also disallowed.
Due to the impractical nature of researching the copyright status of any art work reused in deviations, many copyright violations remain untouched until the violation has been proven. Administrative work regarding policy violations is often viewed as one-sided and unconcerned; this is because some users are not aware of the copyright policies, and claim to be falsely or mistakenly accused. This has led to many clashes with users and staff.
Concerns over Free Expression
A fair concern for some deviantART members is the supposed increasing intolerance towards certain kinds of art, such as those depicting male nudity, as opposed to the female nude which is very popular on the site, especially, and, most controversially, popular for a Daily Deviation (the spotlighting of a particular piece). The main concern is that a website which is supposed to promote free expression should not be censoring artworks based on the moderators' preferences (whether sexual or otherwise).
The deviantART moderators are also able to delete any Deviation at will, albeit only if that Deviation has broken the rules of the site. However, there have been worries that artworks or comments have been deleted when they back up positions that either contradict the site's staff, political positions, portray the wrongdoing of a white person, or draw slander towards the site's sponsors or potential sponsors (and has happened on several occasions).
Concerns over deviantMOBILE
The deviantMOBILE service allows artworks to be downloaded to a user's phone wallpaper free of charge, whether that user is the author or not, but only if the original author has agreed. This has raised some copyright concerns, especially because the original authors of the downloaded Deviations receive none of the revenue produced.
The main concern over the service is that it is an opt-out service rather than an opt-in one, in that all artworks submitted to the site before the onset of deviantMOBILE were automatically signed up for the service. This led to many full galleries being made available without the authors' awareness, following from many artists not receiving the emails that warned them of the introduction of deviantMOBILE.
Most objections to the service fail to take into account the stipulation in the license agreement that deviantART may distribute anything submitted to the site using any form of digital media. However, some also point out that a mobile-phone screen is hardly the place for artworks, and devalues or defaces the work of many artists unfairly.
References
- Deviants Descend on Tinseltown, Wired news article by David Cohn. (June 21, 2005)
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- Note: The summit was held Friday and Saturday, contrary to how the second paragraph of the Wired article reads.
See also
External links
- deviantART website
- deviantART prints
- deviantART Summit website
- deviantMAG. (defunct)
- History of deviantART, Inc. according to Scott Jarkoff (Founder) Part 1 Part 2
- History of deviantART, Inc. according to Angelo Sotira.
- Interview with Angelo Sotira (CEO) (restricted)
- deviantART, Inc. IRC server Official channel is #devart
- deviantART Messaging Network (dAmn). Official channel is #devart.
- deviantART groups deviant group system is under construction. See : http://groups.deviantart.com/staff/ for an example.