[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.