The East and the West? Pixiv and deviantART?

The focus of the creative industries between the eastern and the western cultures are almost polar opposites; the western creative industry places high emphasis on technology-assisted production and technical perfection to bring spectacular effects, while the eastern creative industry remains very appreciative of traditional illustrations and animations done primarily by hand. Because of the differences in what each culture finds valuable, art as a whole have become notably more commercialized in the western creative industry compared to its eastern counterpart (Perkel, 2011).

The differences in culture is readily apparent when we look at the differences between to major art community websites, deviantART and Pixiv.

The site known as deviantART was founded over ten years ago in 2000, and is still going strong today. Admittedly the site began as a community of software modification enthusiasts, but it was the implementation of allowing users to upload and share their own art with each other which defined deviantART. Key features of the site include the ability of a user to build a gallery of their own works, start collections consisting of other user's works, and being able to leave commentary on each other's pieces (Perkel, 2011).

In contrast, Pixiv is art community website launched in 2007 and based in Tokyo, Japan. In its four to five years of existence, Pixiv has enjoyed massive popularity, such that the site has attracted major followings from all around the world. This popularity also lends its influence and presence to overlap in the western creative industry, for better or for worse (which I will comment more about later) (Pixiv Inc., 2013).

Much of Pixiv's architecture is similar to deviantART in the sense that it is built as an art community site, but at the same time there are several key differences which define them.

deviantART seemingly places a great amount of emphasis in capitalizing on artwork; the site has developed its own currency, known as "points", in which users can use to buy commissions from other artists or pay for premium account services. But the biggest innovation in this aspect is how deviantART allows users to sell prints of their work through the site itself. Users have the option to allow other users to buy prints of their work through deviantART's print shop, which nets them a margin of profit for every print sold. Of course, such a system also means that deviantART receives a portion of every print sold (deviantART LLC., 2013).

With the influence of the western creative culture overlapping with the east, Pixiv has actually picked up a few of the capitalization features as well, namely the "point" system. Art sharing as a philosophy has split into different branches due to the polarization of community interests (Perkel, 2011). Currently, Pixiv has launched a new branch of their own site, Pixiv (beta) which as "resimplified" to only focus on the original core art and illustration community aspect of the site, omitting the many extraneous features of the main Pixiv site generally sponsored and supported by third-party groups (Pixiv Inc., 2013).

Insight into the culture of the creative community next door, coming up next.

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1. Pixiv Inc.(2013) Pixiv. http://www.pixiv.net
2. deviantART, LLC. (2013) deviantART. http://deviantart.com
3. Kantar Media Company. (2013) Complete | site analytics. Retrieved from http://siteanalytics.compete.com/deviantart.com/
4. Perkel, D. (2011) Making Art, Creating Infrastructure: deviantART and the Production of the Web. (Doctoral dissertation, Berkely, 2011). Retrieved from http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Perkel_berkeley_0028E_11934.pdf