Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

cdahmedeh.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 273 posts

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#121

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

swayvil wrote: post #107
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy the arts as much as anyone else, but the narrative that art by default is a transformative force for social good is just that, a nice marketing sleight of hands. Most art is entertainment, with a rather minuscule slice having something interesting to say. Not to say that entertainment isn't valuable and pleasurable, but there's a big gap between that and it advancing humanity.

No, not by default. 1 in a 1000. But still. And we're talking all realms of unrestrained creative effort here. Science, technology and stories about dragons. Opensource software as well as basement watercolorists. This is where the shiny new legos of our society come from.

This seems a little motte-and-baileyish. You start with "arts make the world a better place" and when presented with a critique you retreat towards "arts are the same as technology and science, let's treat them as one single group", which I don't buy.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#122

Post by pcwalton »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #95

There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the rest of us normies toil in obscurity and sell our souls to corporate overlords to pay the bills. Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginner…

A lot of people would say the same about programmers.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#123

Post by trebbble »

mikkergp wrote: post #66
nine_k wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the church(es) which employed many of them. On top of that, music was not a commodity back then. Live performances literally made a living for many of them as these performances were the only source of music. (And a church needs this music for every mass, for instance.) Now music is abundant, recordings are cheap / free, and the best performance is easily available in a recorded form. Live performances are stil…

Dall-E for music will be interesting, but I think it's different. In a sense I think we're already there. Not in the sense that AI makes music but that music is so abundant, and there already aren't a ton of jobs in music writing. It's not a trade in the same way that like graphic design is. I mean, maybe Hans Zimmer loses his job but socially it doesn't seem like that big of an impact. Musicians don't tend to make m…

I hadn't thought about it until just now, but soundtrack music has been so terrible for the last 15-20 years that it's one area AI might genuinely be much better than what we've got now. Be hard to do worse, anyway. Studios and producers don't want to pay for good music anymore, so maybe they can get so-so AI music for cheap, and at least it'll be better than the crap they're using now.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#124

Post by spywaregorilla »

vanadium1st wrote: post #87

Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…

Is the local music scene up and running? Aren't you like 100 miles from the front?

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#125

Post by sidlls »

boredemployee wrote: post #103
vanadium1st wrote: post #87

Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…

I believe in the statement by Albert Barabasi who says that to be successful in art all you need is a good network, nothing else.

That’s true for almost any field.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#126

Post by vanadium1st »

perfmode wrote: post #101
vanadium1st wrote: post #87

Outside of my regular job, I am an indie folk music artist, trying to rise in the local music scene here in Dnipro, Ukraine. Even though learning to be a musician from scratch in my 20s was a hard process that took years and years, by far the hardest part of it was trying to establish a passive income, so I could have enough free time for practicing, performing and writing music. A lot of my talented peers are so muc…

Thanks for sharing. Do you have any music online?

Thank you for your interest. At this moment I am only performing live and am not proud enough of my performance level to record it and share it online

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#127

Post by rafaelero »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #95

There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the rest of us normies toil in obscurity and sell our souls to corporate overlords to pay the bills. Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginner…

With the development of AI, it's been quite an experience to see artists grasping the fact that their craft is not the magical thing they think it is.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#128

Post by Geonode »

jfengel wrote: post #106
joe_hills wrote: post #54

I hope anyone who wants to pursue the arts doesn’t let pessimists like this discourage them from expressing themselves in the ways they love best. I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick. My path was to find a full-time job that used different parts of my brain from my art. I used my limited free time to brainstorm, create, and publish whatever I could make ti…

I am active in non-professional theater, and a lot of people come through my group with the hope of becoming professionals. My advice to them is that if there is anything else they can do, do it. Being a professional actor is miserable. The odds are it will fail entirely; most of the remainder will barely make subsistence. Much of what I do is to provide a place for people to be genuinely creative in ways that they c…

As a long time theatre professional, all theatre is non professional. Or rather, it's not a business, and therefore there's not an avenue to success.

All theatre, even (and especially) Broadway exists only because rich people funnel free money into it. Regionally as donors, and on Broadway as "investors" who almost never make a return.

It is a rich people's hobby and for those who do make a career out of it, it's lottery winning odds to be middling comfortable. One percent of one percent become well off.

You may also notice, as an audience member, that it is almost universally terrible entertainment. It just sort of shuffles on through the centuries with an occasional Hamilton and lots and lots of wealthy networking opportunities.

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#129

Post by ModernMech »

falcolas wrote: post #69
phoe-krk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The inherent value of art is zero. So is the inherent value of gold, sans its use in electronics and dentistry.

That "sans" is doing a lot of work, especially with regards to electronics. Gold's traits - high conductivity, low reactivity - provide a lot of inherent value because we build electronics in a highly reactive atmosphere.

But then the question becomes: what is the inherent value of electronics? If I buy a TV with gold conductors in it, I'm not buying it for the sake of just having a TV; in large part I'm buying it to display art (movies and TV shows). So then we're back to the gold only being valuable in the process of providing me access to art, whose inherent value is...?

Re: You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

#130

Post by Geonode »

golly_ned wrote: post #91
syndacks wrote: post #62

Hi Ahmed, I want to read your piece, but your opening sentence needs some work: >Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. This is largely unintelligible and, as a writer, I think something you should consider making more concrete. Otherwise, you run the risk of leaving your readership confuse…

This is so patronizing.

No, throughout the article there are major hallmarks of underdeveloped English writing mastery, and overall the whole thing is a bit more florid than it is clear and to the point.
Post reply on HN