Every fan-artist or fanfiction writer has heard a variation of this at least once: "Why don't you do real art instead?" Sometimes it's phrased more like concern: "You're really talented, and you'd be successful if you only stopped drawing/writing 'x'" or "You'll never make a career out of fanworks".
I don't like this at all. It devalues not only creative endeavours, but the people who create them. It's a a social problem, and it needs to stop. You probably think I'm overreacting, and right now, that's fine. Just read on a bit before you make up your mind completely.
Fanart is seen as 'lesser' because it draws on existing work and doesn't require the artist's own imagination or creativity.
If anything, people are more critical of fanfiction and fanart because it draws from an existing work, one that people admire enough to find and read fanworks of. Characters are judged against the standard of the original - if they are too different, works easily become out of character and unappealing to fans.
It takes a lot of close analysis to truly understand complex characters - to not only understand what they do, but why. This 'why' is essential to fanworks, to understand how a character may react in circumstances they aren't shown in in the original media.
Original art and writing has the privilege of being judged on it's own merit, outside of a pre-existing idea of setting, tone and character. It's far easier to work out the motivations of your characters - you should know them intimately, having created them - than the motivations of another's characters, where you only have what limited knowledge the creator has made public about them.
If fanart was somehow a 'lesser' art form, you would be writing off a vast proportion of art through the ages. Every biblical and mythological painting would be inferior, because it's just fanart (often commissioned fanart) of the Bible and classical myths. Not to mention the wealth of literature you'd be passing up. Tolkien was inspired by Shakespeare, Shakespeare was inspired by Chaucer and Plutarch. All classical literature were inspired by word of mouth tales, embellished over years of oral storytelling tradition, before writing and reading were commonplace.
The Arthurian tales are a good example of this: Celtic folkstories were passed down by word of mouth over hundreds of years, finally being written down in the Mabinogion. These tales were later embellished by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and framed in a way to be more appealing to French audiences. These chivalrous tales became reinterpreted time and time again - Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Marion Zimmer Bradley - they've all had a hand, big or small in changing the way we perceive the Arthurian legends. This is of course, without mentioning the many film and television adaptations of the myths; from Disney to Monty Python, so many people have reworked and re-imagined the tales. It is a truly successful fanwork, in it's current state. It bears little resemblance to the original Celtic myths, barring a few recognisable details, and yet it's known internationally.
Of course, delve a little deeper, and you'd see that there aren't many 'original' works of art, anyway, even in modern media. Films are predominantly sequels and adaptations of other media. Any long running television show has to employ writers to carry on the existing story, as it is too much work for one writer to do alone. Long running comics and graphics novels are in a constant cycle of renewing artists and writers to carry on the story as previous artists and writers move on to different projects. Even games are often sequels or remakes of existing games. In fact, if you wanted to eschew any unoriginal ideas, you'd have to search for obscure content creators - independent film festivals, small press books, small art shows - it'd be a huge boost for independent media, until you noticed the reoccurring tropes in all these things, even as original as they are.
The thing is, art doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's meant to ask questions, to be explored and responded to. The problem is, the people who are against fanworks aren't really against the idea of fanworks. They want their favourite series to continue, and they want to keep enjoying film adaptations even if they aren't aware of the original media it came from. If they were against the idea of fanworks, these logical arguments would have won out against them a long time ago - I'm certainly not the first to make these points. The world would also be much poorer for the amount of art that got spurned as they rejected anything that could be feasibly termed a fanwork.
No, they're really against the people who make fanworks. Fanfiction and fanart is primarily a term applied to female artists within fandoms. It's certainly not to say that male don't create fanworks - they do, and face a lot of the same criticisms, but the problem is caused by the way society sees and codes fandom as female. There is a long history of bias towards work that is coded as 'feminine' as being valued less than work coded as 'masculine'. Fandom creators become seen as amateurs, creating work for free - ignoring the fact that some creators are professionals, and dabble in fanworks as exercise, for publicity or even just because it's fun - and further devaluing the idea of fanart in capitalism (the argument being that if creators are so talented, why aren't they making money from it, which implies that money is the materialistic end goal for all creative endeavours).
When a caricaturist draws a celebrity, it's not fanart, it's just art. When a woman does the same, it's fanart. When a screenwriter writes the script for the latest book adaptation, it's not fanfiction, it's just a script. When a storyboard artist or a concept artist or a digital painter is doing the work that makes any movie possible, often referencing earlier designs or movies or media, they are creating art, not fanart. All of these positions are male-dominated, where female artists are the exception, not the norm. There are social, economic and cultural barriers in order to limit the amount of women in these jobs (and this is not limited to the art world and creative jobs, either). It's not the fault of any one person, but a system of exclusion that is upheld to maintain the status quo as much as possible. Disregarding fandom and fanworks as 'not real' art helps maintain that status quo.
While I have many issues with '50 Shades of Grey', it's undeniable that it is an example of fanwork that has become successful. It's far from an isolated incident, either; many authors have been discovered through fanfiction, many fanartists have gained work through their fanart. I only hope this becomes more usual, and that the stigma around fanworks ceases for good. It helps no one to put down fanworks - not the artist creating them, nor the established artists making a name for themselves through 'original' works.
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