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Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

independent.co.uk

111–120 of 159 posts

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#111

One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is Dale Chihuly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly ), the renown glass sculptor. Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hir…

Hmm. If a composer can't personally play or direct his/her piece (e.g. a symphony), is it still composer's art?

The generally accepted answer is "yes, this is composer's art". But it's also generally accepted that those who render the piece also take part in the art, in a different way. The bigger the influence, the more noticeable part it is. You don't normally ask who plays particular violins in an orchestra string group, but you do notice the first violin, and the director; you say "Gould plays Bach", or you say "Band N covers band M's hit". The influence of the performer is very visible, and makes a lot of difference. Still, without the composer's art, their performance would not be possible.

I don't see why this parallel can't apply to other collectively performed art (or any activity).

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#112
Artist here. An anecdotal example of what the article discusses: an acquaintance of mine works for arguably the most commercially successful sculptor/Contemporary Artist in the world. Get him drunk at a dinner party and he'll talk about his job, which consists of working to create new "forms", by which he means 3-dimensional shapes, entirely on his own. Once in a while his employer pops into the studio and says the equivalent of "that one", and then it gets enlarged, painted, and sold as the exclusive creation of his boss for millions of pounds. He'll gripe privately about what HN'ers would call "IP", but he's also got a stable job, definitely at the upper end of what technicians get paid, and at this point in his life it would be a huge risk to his family's welfare try to make it on his own as an 'Artist'.

The analogies to a CEO, coach, architect etc will fall down because in none of those jobs does she, at the end, singularly own the entire physical and intellectual property of the object created when collaboration is involved...and of course in many cases there isn't a physical 'object' but rather a performance, a set of instructions, etc. While that is the point of the article, I think it's worth highlighting because it changes how an artist behaves and works with their 'team', hidden or not. It's also representative of how unusual a field art is. Another example is simply what happens in the buying and selling of Contemporary Art...investment funds secretly colluding with galleries to prop up auction prices which they then use as new (inflated) baselines to sell work to their own clients, members of museum acquisition boards arranging for their institution to buy works of artists that they personally own, tax evasion on a massive scale, etc. Conflicts of interest that might put people in prison in other fields can sometimes be part of my normal business day.

I like reading HN discussions about art because there are always attempts to think through an issue from first principles, where those first principles are some commenter's personal definition of what art 'is'. Artists don't do that. Trying to argue about what art 'is', amongst artists, generally stops after your first year in art school because the most popular definitions of art are self-reflexive (Dickie's "Institutional Definition" is the classic one). This self-reflexivity of Art implies that the definition of an Artist is also circular...which I'd suggest makes any sort of 'standard model' of the accepted behaviour of Artists difficult to pin down. To put it another way: in my experience, Art tends to be anything on the spectrum between “What Happens” and "What Someone Will Pay For". How to codify that as a field is nebulous enough. Now imagine creating, much less enforcing, a set of ethical labour practices specific to this field. And again, instead of these circularities being immediately thrown out as they would be in many other disciplines, they are seen as a part of Art's unique character as a field itself.

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think it's almost the opposite in my experience as a physicist. Often graduate students are given the first author position, the position which indicates the most credit, even though in many ways the graduate student is closer to a highly skilled technician following the path laid down by their more experienced professor.

The OP is right to raise questions about this in academics. The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics: The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way. The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author…

> The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.

> For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.

These two points seem at odds to each other, why should the professor be given no credit?

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#114

One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is Dale Chihuly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly ), the renown glass sculptor. Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hir…

I don't think this is an interesting thought experiment. You need not fully create a work of art to be an artist. Do you care that a photographer used a Canon DSLR, translated the sensor data to a JPEG using Adobe RAW, and printed using an Epson printer? No. The art is the photograph and the non-artistic tasks were farmed out to Canon, Adobe, and Epson.

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#115

As an artist, this article makes me so upset. The people doing the actual work should be getting credit. Of course the people coming up with the ideas should be getting credit too. When one person comes up with the idea and another with product, it's a collaborative work and credit should be shared. Artists who try to pass off a work they merely collaborated on as exclusively their own are despicable.

I would agree, very strongly (I do a fair bit of fine art painting besides my software engineering day job).

If so and so has the idea and so and so executes it, the there is a director and an artist working under the director. It seems extremely clear that to use assistants for more than grunt work and calling the finished product your own solo piece is quite dishonest. If we're all so obsessed with the Romantic ideal of the lone genius ala van Gogh, that's both ahistorical and silly of us.

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#116

One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is Dale Chihuly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly ), the renown glass sculptor. Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hir…

Some art is just too big for a single artist. A lot of renisance artists had many apprentices helping out, so this goes back a ways.

Chihuly has litigated and been litigated against by his helpers. His “ paintings” aren’t done by him either. It’s almost like he is a brand.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seattlepi.com/entertainment...

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#117

I'm a musician, and a lot of these ideas are familiar. But I wonder if the music scene is a little bit more mature or realistic (searching for a word here) about it. A work can go through a lot of different hands before it reaches an audience. People are fully aware of this. Yes, a few people get screwed, but others make an honest living as "technicians." It's been a reasonable side income for me. And except at the s…

I think music and its production is much more deeply intertwined with regular life than figurative arts.

Band is a thing from elementary school to college. So it's facially idiotic to the man on the street to call a single trumpet player "the artist".

The apparatus to deliver a major pop event is very visible, literally. And it's also obvious that the band didn't put up the stacks of speakers, run the mixing board, etc.

Whereas for a sculpture or painting, it just shows up. Voila! Often without any artist visibly involved. There's now a thing on the sidewalk, or in a museum or gallery.

There's probably a nice way to express this using the term "degrees of alienation", but I can't figure it out before I go back to work. :)

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#118
post #105
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this won't happen with paintings because paintings are not art. They are artificially rare investments. The (financial) powers that makes a painter relevant will ensure new works, even if what you suggest happens, will never carry any value as it implies dissolving the value of previous works. Its the same mechanism that makes only dead painters world famous.

You can't imagine some marketing firm deciding to call new works "Effluvia, by Pablo Picasso"? No arguing it wouldn't have the value of an original, but I'd wager everything it would sell for more than the same thing by Josh Leap. I'm thinking black webpages with pencil thin white fonts. You have to scroll down like 3 meters of page before you get to any content, it's just tag lines every break, staggered on either s…

I think this vision of the future is a little too despondent for my first cup of coffee.

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#119

One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is Dale Chihuly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly ), the renown glass sculptor. Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hir…

Funny this comes up. I've recently become friends with someone who worked for Chihuly, doing precisely this.

They have commented on how the "technicians" put a lot of effort and research into turning Chihuly's designs into a piece of glass. They aren't just "cranking it out"; they're figuring out how the pieces can be made, in the first place.

This is without getting into personalties, beyond this rhetorical tease of a sentence.

Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

#120
post #105
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this won't happen with paintings because paintings are not art. They are artificially rare investments. The (financial) powers that makes a painter relevant will ensure new works, even if what you suggest happens, will never carry any value as it implies dissolving the value of previous works. Its the same mechanism that makes only dead painters world famous.

You can't imagine some marketing firm deciding to call new works "Effluvia, by Pablo Picasso"? No arguing it wouldn't have the value of an original, but I'd wager everything it would sell for more than the same thing by Josh Leap. I'm thinking black webpages with pencil thin white fonts. You have to scroll down like 3 meters of page before you get to any content, it's just tag lines every break, staggered on either s…

I can imagine the art world rejecting a newly produced work by Picasso. In fact, it’s already happened: many forgeries have been made and disclaimed over the years. The difference is just that a truly new “Picasso,” marketed for what it is would not land anyone in prison.
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