[arty_throwaway]

Contemporary artist here, with gallery representation. I also teach on, arguably, the best undergrad "fine art" program in the world.

It is worth pointing out what this artist's practice actually is. The audience here might be afraid of conjectures around the subjective phenomena of "taste", so let me propose this:

That thing that everyone complains about here when you make an interesting app, put it up, and there's a cheaper Chinese produced version of it within a month that's got a better ranking in the app store than yours? That's what this guy is doing in art terms. The "product" is derivative, and frankly, so is the hustle. That's not why most of us make art, and his work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads (much less the "art world" in general) who are typically optimizing for innovation in the field.

I would argue that this guy doesn't really need to be an artist, in the same way that we don't really need the 50th knockoff of the same app. Sure he can do it and I guess good on him for making some money from it, but those are separate questions compared to those of most artists. He could use those same skills he discussed to sell used cars or vapes or something. Or maybe just be a programmer and "ship"? Notice that he doesn't even attempt to explain what is novel or contextually relevant about his work, or even where his desire to do it, as opposed to selling any other product, comes from?

Personally, I use my teaching to create economic space for myself to not need to be in thrall to a flippant and cruel "market". I have some basic rules for my gallery (no sales to arms dealers, no sales to oil industry, leaning that way towards AI/tech tbh) but one of the reasons I have a gallery, in addition to lightening my cognitive load of all the admin and sales in general, is because I suspect it would damage my capacity to make cutting-edge work if I knew how the sausages were made. It's most certainly not the only way to do it, it's just how I've landed. I usually advise my students starting out to follow the Phillip Glass method (really, the 1970s-90s method): get a part-time job that pays the most you can get but that does the work that will kill your mind the least, so you have at least 1 extra day and the mental space to do your 'real' work with that 1 day plus the weekend. Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat. I will admit it is getting much harder to do this now, so my advice may be outdated.

Anyway, I'm being snarky, and he would correctly argue it's gatekeeping. But just a bit of context for the discussion here.

[Cthulhu_]

It sounds like / I feel like there's two categories of artists; the one is in it for the art (and would benefit from e.g. a patron or subsidies like the Irish one mentioned elsewhere / also currently on the front page) if their stuff isn't commercially viable.

But the other, and this is the vast, VAST majority of people, create content. Not to be too disparaging, but if the objective is a paycheck then that's what is being made. And this is everywhere - marketing, digital design, video game assets, book series, commissions, etc.

Yes it takes artistic skills to do it, but is it "art"? Is it something (as the comment I'm replying to says) "novel or contextually relevant"? Or is it doing what needs doing because the boss says so?

I think it's important to make this distinction. And that's also the gist of people who want to do art as their day job - there's plenty of work, but you have to accept you're doing what other people want you to do instead of try to do something new.

[snowwrestler]

You’re making a point mostly about aesthetics. But regardless of aesthetics, to be a working artist, the artist needs to make money.

Sounds like you make money partially by teaching and partially by gallery sales. Which are two of the commercially viable paths that are mentioned in this essay.

> Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat.

The point of this article is simply that the above will not happen by accident.

[arty_throwaway]

Not really, I'm making a point about the category of activity. Whether what this guy does is art practice vs product sales that use a claim of art. The article isn't claiming that making a living from art will not happen by accident, and if it was, it would be wrong because that's fairly common. See Van Gogh, Kahlo, Basquiat, Vermeer, on and on. This is all work that was optimized for innovation, not for some sort of market fit, and in these cases the work became successful either after their death, or in spite of antagonism towards the market. Deliberate commercial strategy is a path, but the historical record suggests it's not the one that produces the most significant work, and that's what most artists are trying to do.

I think the point about aesthetics is particularly useful to rebut here because it conflates aesthetics with taste. One is a personal preference that's subjective and not always interesting to argue about. But aesthetic evaluation is a rigorous discipline with criteria, history, and shared standards developed over thousands of years. This is what I meant when I say the work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads, because this is what they are doing.

To reframe (again) in HN terms: imagine someone who built a successful SaaS product writing an essay called "How to Be a Scientist" and the core advice is to run your lab like a business, find "hypothesis-market fit," and if your research isn't getting cited, just research something else entirely. A working scientist would find this almost incoherent. The business thinking isn't irrelevant to running a lab, however it confuses commercializing the outputs of a discipline with doing the very point of the discipline itself. When scientists do optimize for citations, and in academia they have to sometimes ("publish or perish"), the scientific community generally regards it as a corruption of the process, not good practice.

[bondarchuk]

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