(Too many of my creative friends, for all values of "creative", are socialized to believe that treating their profession like it is a business will somehow suck all the magic out of that. If you like friendly-local-fine-artist, you owe it to them to help counteract years of indoctrination on this score.)
A young lady at a Renaissance fair produced an artistic work heavily inspired by a photo of Ruriko and I at our wedding. (She, incidentally, undercharged and had to be tipped into accepting a reasonable wage, then attempted to convince me that I was overtipping. Art culture: GAH!) That work is certainly available for less than what she charged... somewhere over in China, where middle class RenFair participants who are primed to spend money are presently not wandering while considering "Hey I wonder if I could get a wedding photo done as human art?"
A really smart business decision she made was a) bringing several samples of high-saliency events done in her signature style (weddings/graduations/etc) and b) hiring a barker, whose only job was selling passerby on artwork when she was producing it on the spot. Another smart decision was working directly with clients on the spot: that was a definite value add versus uploading the JPG into a CRUD app then shipping it halfway around the world. The venue handles a lot of customer selection for you, too -- you can imagine that "homemade using the techniques of the ancients; not like that factory-produced nonsense you'd find at BigBox" carries a lot of weight with many of the people who willingly bust themselves back to the Middle Ages for part of a day. (I'd note that pitch was successful at selling several hundred dollars worth of soap in a ten minute period I observed the soap store. Having used $20 of it myself, I can reliably report that P&G ROFLstomps your typical artisan on soap quality, but then again they don't sell any soap called Dragon's Blood, so decisions decisions.)
It's true if you're just straight up copying a photo, you're going to have to compete with the Chinese commercial art industry. But they don't do creative work, so any amount of deviation from just copying a photo and you'll have a leg up.
Frankly artists here don't want to copy photos, and even the studio artists we interviewed in China don't want to do that either. But it's a steady source of income for them.
I'd suggest you talk to some artists here first and get their opinion, and then talk to some of the artists in China, because that's what I did.
Oh and the PAINT alone in the USA ranges from the crazy gonna like posion you cheap (~5 bucks/color US dollars) to expensive (80 bucks/color US dollars). That doesn't even cover canvas, brushes, or space to paint in. lets not forget about time. A persons' time is worth something too. Explain to me how an artist can survive with material costs like that on 50-400 a painting when it takes hours/days for one person to paint a reproduction.
[edit] I forgot about gesso, that isn't cheap either.
Like I said, if you want to be explained how the Chinese artists are surviving, then ask one in China. Dafen is a huge tourist destination and is not actually a secret "village."
Our default assumption would be that cost of goods are equal in US and China. This seems to be true for the output, but not the input. So the reason that artists in America cannot make it is that housing and food is more expensive than in China.
Just saying, not enough support to do what you want to do.
Why is housing more expensive? 1. More expensive land (more desirable place to live) 2. More expensive to build house. a) Higher labour costs (can't just import cheap chinese labour because of visas) b) Stricter building codes.
It's cheaper to live in China than the USA because Americans expect that they will have a salary + medical benefits that will allow them to afford a 3 bedroom house of their own in the suburbs built to rather more exacting construction standards than China, 2 cars which they drive 20k miles/year, a family vacation every year, medical prices that cover the cost of doctors purchase insurance to protect against litigious Americans' expensive lawsuits, and pay taxes that support large social programs and one of the world's largest standing Armies. Prices for American workers and goods reflect these expectations.
It's a lot easier to live cheaply when your expectations of housing are a concrete room (shared by a number of friends if you are single), no car, no overseas vacations via plane, medical care provided by the state, and a system where doctors are not at risk of multi-million dollar court cases if they get something wrong.
Art is like going to a concert, an expression of the human condition. Why go if you can listen to a perfect mix of it at home?
How you get a painting is part of the reason you get the painting at all. The story behind it is just as much of the point as the piece itself.
To be clear: If you are in China, buy art from a Chinese artist. If you are in Brazil, buy art from a Brazilian artist.
It sounds an awful lot like you are trying to project your values on to others. If people agreed with you, they wouldn't buy these paintings. And yet they do, in great numbers.
As I see it part of the function of art is to reflect on the culture the artist is in or a part of. This can't be done authentically from afar.
Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds, making us think is one purpose of many artistic creations (some would say that's what makes it art). Partly, I feel, for a society to continue to develop effectively it needs to patronise elements on its philosophical fringes that can move beyond the norms of groupthink, beyond the acceptable establishment paths of thought and then present the ideas experienced in a way that makes others question their position and the progress of that culture.
If we take away the bread and butter work of burgeoning artists then in order to have artists in our local culture that can serve this function in society we need to create some other means to support them.
A foreign artist can't honestly reflect on a culture they haven't experienced, an immigrant artist who comes to experience a new culture can create art that serves both their native culture and the culture they newly experience however - but you can't do that [in the same way] from a room half-way around the globe IMO.
>Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds
I would agree, but I would disagree that art from the Chinese artists in question can't accomplish this. If you saw a painting that came from there, but didn't know its provenance, could it not accomplish this? Would learning where it came from change how you felt about it? One might say these artists are simply copying photographs people send them, and they are, but they are still human reproductions and there is inevitably some element of interpretation on the part of these artists in producing the paintings. As I see it, that is art, and it is no less intrinsically valuable, kitschy as it may be.
At my office, people have been using fiver in a similar way - to order gag custom written songs for different people. We basically have theme songs for all our regular meetings now.
Or because their supporters tell people to "buy a print from a printing machine" if they don't like their approach?