In the past three days, I’ve come across two different news articles about artists wanting regulation in their state. Yesterday I found one about Arizona and today I found the second one about demands for regulation in Utah.
Now, the problem with regulation is that some feel it doesn’t benefit artists at all and that more regulation means more government interference by clueless bureaucrats who have nothing better to do than bitch and whine about specifics that are entirely irrelevant. Fair enough, that’s one way of looking at it.
But from yet another perspective, we have incidents like this one occurring in which idiots like Chastity Bendele are tattooing themselves and getting mutant infections that the media doesn’t really bother to differentiate from regular, professional tattoo. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: regulation helps us all and it doesn’t have to be a completely intrusive and ridiculous mess of red tape. Artists themselves can push for the changes that they want to see in the way that tattoo is regulated. Tattooist Vinny Sky is a perfect example of that.
‘Sky pushed Coconino County to pass regulations on tattooing and even helped to write them a decade ago. Coconino is currently the only county in the state that regulates tattoo shops and artists. He is pushing Maricopa County to become the second.’
This issue in many ways is still in its infancy, but one thing that remains certain is that some sort of change has to be made. If this change is left up to the governments to handle, it will be a long, drawn out process that will most likely become far more confusing than necessary. Maybe it’s time that more artists who are in favour of regulation got involved in the way that Vinny Sky and others like him are doing?