Active sellers increased 62% to 4.37 million, Etsy said.Įtsy shares jumped 11% Friday to close at $220, near their all-time high.Īfter masks became a key demand driver in 2020 and generated $734 million, or more than 7% in Etsy’s full-year gross merchandise value, they slowed to 4% of fourth-quarter gross merchandise value from a peak of 14% in the second quarter. We’re all talking about the coronavirus at the moment, and if there was ever a time to turn to creative people to help us visualise our thoughts or work through the issues, it’s now.Etsy’s fourth-quarter active buyers rose 77% to nearly 82 million as the company added 13 million new buyers and 7 million lapsed buyers returned. “I am suggesting, however, that Etsy lets artists explain the purpose of their work before it is removed without warning.”
“I'm not proposing that Etsy renews all of the removed listings, mainly because some of them MAY be misleading” Rubio-Weiss writes on the petition page. The virus image was created on commission from a virologist, and wasn’t directly intended to represent the new SARS-CoV-2 virus, but a general coronavirus. She creates science art using a stipple art technique and had included a coronavirus among her other science-themed products. Rubio-Weiss also had one of her products removed from Etsy. In an attempt to change this, biology graduate student and science artist Sydni Rubio-Weiss has started a petition to ask Etsy to consider coronavirus themed items on a case by case basis, and to let artists explain the purpose behind the work. It’s unfortunate that these are all affected equally by Etsy’s ban. The same website that hosts creative educational products like Baakdhah’s virus crochet models also hosts non-medical face masks, home-made hand sanitizer and T-shirts with the text “I caught coronavirus and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” (which all show up on the site this past weekend, even after the ban),Ĭrafts and artworks that are created to inform and to make you think are not at all comparable to someone selling fake homemade “remedies” or trying to turn a quick buck from a global disaster. On a large marketplace like Etsy, however, there is no context. The message was always clear: “Screened For” was meant to make you think and talk about disease, not to downplay it. But unlike the artists whose work has been removed from Etsy, nobody ever thought Whittaker was capitalizing on the diseases she represented in her work.
Around the same time as Whittaker’s “Screened For” first started appearing in galleries, the World Health Organisation declared a Zika virus epidemic. Artists are part of those same conversations but turn their thoughts into art.Īnd new outbreaks happen all the time.
We all hear about it all day on the news, and it’s a non-stop conversation topic among friends. That there is a burst of new coronavirus art following a current outbreak isn’t surprising. The work has been displayed in galleries around the world, and invites viewers to consider the relation between fear and beauty. “We are biological hosts, and microbes keep us alive, though some can also cause infectious disease and illness.”Įlaine Whittaker's work "Screened For" depicts the micro-organisms behind several major diseases on. “My artworks are set in a clear aesthetic context that encourages viewers to think about microorganisms and the critical role they play in our lives-culturally, historically and scientifically,” says Whittaker. Since 2015, the work has been displayed at galleries around the world, where it has invited people to think about the balance between fear of disease and the beauty of the natural world.
#Etsy multipass covid series#
Toronto artist Elaine Whittaker’s work “ Screened For” is a series of images of her wearing face masks with paintings of infectious diseases, including SARS, West Nile Virus, and HIV/AIDS. Viruses and disease are inevitable parts of life and they have long inspired artists in many different ways. The idea of selling a cute small and soft model of a disease vector for educational purposes might seem less strange if you consider that this is the entire business model of Giant Microbes, which produces a whole slew of diseases in toy form, from chlamydia to cancer, as visual talking points and educational aids.īut science art is not always for educational purposes.
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