Visionary Art Membership Invitations

This blog is directed towards Members of the Private Visionary Art Network, to Visionary Artists in general, as well as Artists of the Santiago Ribeiro Network who had been invited to join our Network on or about August 18th 2009:

We NEVER mass-mail invitations to become a member of our Private Network "Visionary Art". We are not spamers!
Prospective members are carefully selected and approached individually.
We are not interested in growing the membership for the sake of growth, but in aquiring new members that will positively enhance our private network with their presence.
We encourage our members to invite close friends, kindred artists they can vouch for.
New members are subject to approval by administration. We have 15 highly respected and trusted administrators.

Having said that, I am sorry to report that on August 18th, our network MESSAGING CENTER was swamped with an avalanche of membership invitations and briefly shut down under the sheer weight of applications pending.

The first guess was that one of our members e-mail had been hacked, and spam applications were sent out to a huge number of addresses. Upon second reflection I must say that while likely, it may also have been a glitch (or a mistake) in the Ning system, having to do with importing a e-mail contact list: the default checkmarks ALL contacts, and if not careful, a simple click will send e-mails to all contacts on the list, not just the one person you may have wanted to target!

One of the "Prospective New Members" was none other than the notorious WAF head honcho JoJo Marengo! The last thing I needed was someone of his ilk to invade our private network! Anyone not familiar with the issues involving Marengo, please check the Art Review post: GEORGE a.k.a. "JO JO" Marengo and the WORLD ART FOUNDATION (WAF) Scam and follow the links.

To restore the disabled Network Messaging Center, I waded into the pile and deleted all invitations and pending applications. Unfortunately, amongst them were most likely legitimate candidates, many from the Ribeiro Network, that otherwise we would welcome with open arms.

I therefore apologize to those artists: this should in no way be construed as an affront! We will in due time continue to invite artists to join us. Again, these invitations will happen by personal contact, not mass-mailings!

LOVE, PEACE AND HAPPYNESS

OTTO RAPP