The Amateur Owner

Sorry to abandon you all there.  NAN got in my way.

Moving on...in the past few weeks, I've been having sort of half on, half off discussions with many people about The Future Of The Hobby.  This tends to get people wringing their hands about youth showing, and I'll get there eventually, but I personally do not think that kids are necessarily The Future of the Hobby.

In the typical Natural History of the model horse hobbyist, you bought Breyers like crazy when you were a teenager (assuming boys and/or real horses did not take over) and when you got to college age, you Grew Up, sold your plastic ponies and joined the real world until you hit your 30s where you had money and time again, and hey, remember those Breyers?

Now, the natural history of the model horse hobbyist has undergone some dramatic changes in the past decade or so:

- it is less common for a person truly entrenched in the hobby to truly leave, or even take a hiatus on the scale that we used to.  College kids stay on board via the internet.
- it is easier to find local connections to encourage the obsession, thanks, again, to the internet.
- hobby activity is more stratified than it used to be, even though we fail to recognize this.  It leads to conflict among factions with different goals, as those different goals are rarely recognized.  Take showing at Nationals as an example--people whose goal is to show and win at Nationals is different than someone who gets a ticket and feels that the show should be as inexpensive as a local show.  We don't rate our shows based on goals or experience (I don't know that we TRULY have a base large enough to set up an A rate show circuit, but maybe its time to dink around with that idea)

In Region 10, we are starting to talk about Novice shows, and youth shows, and the amateur owner (AO) division.  I'm planning on getting into Novice and Youth in later posts, so for now, let's consider the AO.

I can recall showing my "roll my own" horses 15 years ago when New England Spring Expo had its AO division.  It was never very large, but it was often quite tough, and past AO entrants included people like Carlee Balling and Jen Timm (now Al-Biek.)  This was at about the same time that the Resin Revolution was in full swing, and you could have a body that you could slap any color you wanted to in fairly short order.  For a while, all my horses were my own work.  They were nice, but I don't have the talent or time to really be top notch, and I did flirt with the idea of selling my stuff (there are 2 of my horses out there--one was for sale at least recently, and I may go see if I can buy him back.  I know the other is in a black hole home.) in the end I decided I was not interested in that.

At the time, if your own work won an open grand championship, or a champ at NAN, you were booted from the division.  At the time, this was a smart rule, as it gave way for the next batch of up and comers.  Except NESE was the only show really offering an AO division, and it mostly died when NESE stopped.  I think NEMHC may have done AO for a while, but I don't think they have such a division now.

The AO idea did not really pick up outside of the region.  For a while, there was hearty debate on Haynet (yes, that used to happen) about how to split up custom and resin horses at shows, and most of the world felt that a Simple Custom division would suit the needs of people who wanted to paint their own...except it didn't.  A Simple Custom painted by Sarah Mink wasn't the same thing as one painted by me, even on my best day in the studio.  I sort of slid to buying other people's stuff once I went out of AO for a few reasons: there was no incentive for me to continue showing my own stuff in halter, as my stuff was now only going against stuff done by professional artists.  I had less time and more money to me, and this meant I could buy better things than I could produce.  I turned my creative mojo to performance set ups, which could be dreamed up and mentally worked on in places I could not wrestle with a visual problem. 

And here I am 15 years later, and I've gotten to the point where I am so picky about the resin blank I buy, I am not about to go and put my own paintbrush to it.  I suspect a lot of my other former AO's are in the same boat.

Now we DO have a new crop of people who are where I was 15 years ago, and the AO division has cropped up again at Windrush.  In a brief conversation with Kate (and feel free to chime in, Kate)  she feels that perhaps the accomplishment requirement should be dropped form the AO designation, and just leave it as a place for people who do not sell at all.  Back in the day, you often did morph into a sales force once you had stuff that consistently won, but obviously we've become more diverse than that now.  And I think it would work now, especially since everyone on earth makes medallions which are inexpensive and easy spots to practice without making a huge commitment, or having the anxiety that you might be "ruining" a perfectly nice resin.  People seem a bit more willing to torch up a plastic for the same reasons.

In terms of hobby growth, it really makes more sense to encourage the AO over youth or even novice.  The AO is a person who is invested enough in the hobby to not only show, but to create horses.  These are the people who are already supporting the hobby, at least on a local level, and really, model horse showing truly is all local level.  This is the person who is more likely to stay invested in the hobby and go to future shows, or even hold their own, and this is a person who should be encouraged to stay by giving them a spot to show their work against the work of others who are more or less on the same level.  Is it possible that a high caliber person who chooses not to sell might take over?  Sure, but I think that we are still a small enough community that, on a case by case basis, this person could be taken aside and asked to refrain from AO, assuming they don't take themselves out.  If it gets to be epidemic, then we need to think of a new set of standards, or perhaps, another division.

I do plan on discussing the issues of the Novice and Youth shower too, and I promise it will be in a more timely manner.