When I was younger and even more foolish than I am now, I chased a girl all the way to Japan. Not in the sense of stalking her, but in the sense that my heart told me that if I followed her there for a few weeks, she might eventually return the favor and follow me back to America. My head knew this was a deeply flawed and deluded scheme, but it had become accustomed to losing such arguments and could only stand there shaking itself as my heart marched cheerfully on with Custerian purpose toward its inevitable Little Bighorn of Love.

The rest of that story sucks, and I won’t bore you with more of it. But I’ve never regretted going, because I got to see Japan.

I grew up in a car-traveling family and had seen pretty much all of the continental U.S. by the time I turned 18. But I’d never left North America. And from that perspective, going to Japan was more like visiting another planet than another country. I got my first sense of that as our plane passed over Tokyo: from 30,000 feet, I could clearly read “Coca-Cola” in neon, along with a billion other dazzling, impenetrable messages. From the moment I stepped off the airplane, everything was amazing, different and weird. This was just before anime, manga, Pokemon and Murakami made Japanese pop culture nearly ubiquitous in the states, so all of it was new to me. I spent my first 72 hours in Japan trying to make myself believe that it was just like all of the other places I’d been before finally giving in to its stoic beauty and manic madness.

There was no better or more profound symbol of this otherworldliness than vending machines. For starters, they were everywhere. And their omnipresence was matched only by the wondrous, bizarre and occasionally creepy variety of goods one could obtain from them.

I quickly developed an addiction to a particular brand of canned hot coffee that tasted exactly like liquid Sugar Smacks. Beer and sake were dispensed alongside soft drinks. Need eggs, batteries or a new tie? Vend away. And if a salary man heading home late from the bar after a rousing night of karaoke had a hankering for a pair of panties purportedly worn by an actual Japanese schoolgirl, there was a machine ready to meet his needs. Literally everything up to and including carnal knowledge was available from contraptions that I had previously associated with modest commodities like soda and snack foods.

As I’ve watched the world of Internet commerce grow and evolve, I’ve often thought about Japanese vending machines. Both are symbols of convenience, of the market responding to unmet needs, of the endless pursuit of making things easy. But both also represent the shift in consumer culture away from personal interaction and toward automation. To be sure, you can now get anything up to and including carnal knowledge at all hours of the day and night online. And from the standpoint of pure convenience and economic democracy, that’s a good thing. It’s just that the price of that convenience is human experience and emotional significance.

I realize that most sentient bipeds are more than ready to sacrifice the human experience and emotional significance of being aggressively ignored by the model/actress honing her craft at Banana Republic for the sake of buying a sweater. But seriously, if you can have everything, all the time, then what makes anything special?

The nucleus of ARTCRANK has always been and will always be bicycle-inspired poster artwork. But I’m convinced that what’s made the show successful in all of our locations is the atmosphere created by hundreds — occasionally thousands — of people from all walks of life, coming out to support local art, cycling culture and doing good in their community. And that’s before you throw in fashion shows, trick demos, food trucks, live music, drag races featuring actual drag queens, live t-shirt printing and even live tattooing — all of which have been featured at ARTCRANK events.

This is what we mean when we call it A Poster Party for Bike People. And it’s an experience that no amount of bandwidth or technical whizbangery can even come close to replicating. Even the amazing photos and video that come out of every event struggle to do it justice.

Part of ARTCRANK’s mission is to make art more accessible to people. And at face value, that points to making the artwork from our shows available for purchase online. But I also believe that there’s something about handmade, screen-printed posters that gets lost in the translation from analog to digital. All the pixels in the universe can’t capture the tooth of paper, the texture and topography of the inks, the genius that goes into creating an image from individual layers of color aligned with razor-sharp precision. At every show, I see people reaching out to touch the posters hanging on the wall. Even if it drives me a little crazy, I know they can’t help it. Neither can I.

Beyond philosophy, there are also some very practical reasons that we don’t sell posters online. Each ARTCRANK show features the work of 30+ artists. Multiply that by shows in eight cities, and you’re looking at a potential inventory of nearly 300 posters every year. Working with our artists to get those prints ready for live events is already a full-time job. Pondering the logistics, staff and expense that would be required to inventory, photograph, store, pull, package and ship those posters to individual online buyers boggles what’s left of my mind. And to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t sound one-billionth as fun as staging a live experience that people will eagerly anticipate, enjoy, remember and return to, year after year.

We get emails every day from people who want to buy posters that they’ve seen at shows or in our online galleries. And we are happy to connect them directly to the artists behind those posters whenever we can. I’ve done too many things that I swore I’d never do to say that ARTCRANK will NEVER have sell posters via our website. But given the choice between investing our time, resources and capital in an online poster market or a new live event, the live event will always win.

Right now, I’m reading Threadless, by Jake Nickell, who co-founded the online t-shirt juggernaut of the same name. I feel in love with it in the first paragraph, which reads:

“Threadless was never intended to be a business. When Jacob Dehart and I started out it was all just a hobby —a fun thing to for the other designers we were friends with.”

I had to smile when I read this, because I’ve used those exact words to describe the genesis of ARTCRANK. There are a lot of parallels between the Threadless model and what we do, and it’s inspiring to no end to read about how a business launched by two friends who wanted to share cool designs with the world blossomed into a multimillion-dollar success story.

Given all of the amazing people and experiences that ARTCRANK has brought to my life, I’d be hard-pressed to begrudge Jake and Threadless their success. Many of the same designers we have the honor of representing in our shows have Threadless t-shirts to their credit, and the success of their business has paved the way for ARTCRANK and other design-driven ventures.

But for me, there’s also a cautionary tale side of the story, in the anecdotes about how that growing business quickly became more about packing and shipping than creating and inspiring. Reading those parts of the story validates my commitment to grow ARTCRANK slowly and sustainably. I want ARTCRANK to succeed and grow, just not at the cost of the things that made me want to do it in the first place.

Postcript:

A couple days ago, about the time I started writing this, one of our followers Tweeted a photo that showed two ARTCRANK posters from our 2009 show in Minneapolis, framed and hanging on the wall of her apartment. To her, those posters were special enough that she wanted to share them with all of her friends and followers, which I took as a huge compliment.

I also couldn’t help but wonder if she’d feel the same way about those posters if she’d bought them from an ARTCRANK website instead of at a live event where she got to not only see the art, but meet the artists and share the experience with about a thousand other people who loved bikes and art.

— By Charles K. Youel