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Artists must be allowed to make bad work

austinkleon.com

51–60 of 165 posts

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#51
I thought this was already the case, considering most "art" is garbage anyways (well, 90% of everything, according to that rule).

I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#53
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.

Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable. Da Vinci has, clearly, a monopoly on original items from Da Vinci. So if you're an artist and people value your name, regardless of the product it's written on, you don't have the OP's problem. The problem described only applies if the consumer can get some other art that gives them equivalent satisfaction.

> Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable

No it doesn't. A free market assumes that there are no constraining influences on trade except supply and demand. With the possible exception of a working contract law system.

Free markets happily allow for people to make buying and selling decisions for any reason they choose. If it happens to be for a non-fungible asset, no matter how pointless it may be to other parties, so be it.

Efficient markets imply restricting assumptions on fungibility, so that there can be a meaningful fair price, but it's not required in general.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#54
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off. > There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.

> I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. I've never "understood art", but when you phrased it like that it makes perfect sense. To me, provenance just isn't interesting. So I judge the pieces as they stand in front of me.

There are essentially 3 ways to judge 'art'.

- Do I find this aesthetic

- Do I find this historically/culturally interesting or significant

- Do I find this a good investment

The problem is that people don't always make it clear which one they are judging by and end up talking past each other.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#55
post #50

It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment t…

Something that blew my mind after I spent a few years learning art is that: everyone makes bad art.. even the best artists. For every good painting an artist produces, there are several that have been trashed or painted over. Sketchbooks are often encouraged in the artist community in order to allow ourselves to do bad art that doesn't have to see the light of day.

And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#56
post #50

It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment t…

There is necessarily a correlation between talent, effort and success, because you need at least one of the two parameters to succeed. And the third parameter that will be decisive is luck, but you need a pillar to allow luck to serve a purpose. The pillar is work, done with talent, effort or both. I agree that many artists who are very talented or who put in a lot of work may be less recognized than others. But in general, a great majority of artists, before having the luck, had the talent and the effort, it should not be denied. The only thing that really separates these artists from other talented artists is luck. So I would say that success is the result of a mixture of these 3 main ingredients: effort, talent and luck.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#57
post #10

That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic. But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocrat…

Clearly the machines need rest. "The unreasonable effectiveness of restarting a computer" did not come from nowhere :)

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#58
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear to me, especially with the context provided in the article itself: don't judge an artist solely by the last thing they made; don't write them off just because they're going through a bad patch.

People must be allowed to judge and write off artists solely based on the last thing they made

It is preferable to take a more nuanced approach to judging artists, looking at their entire career and recognizing the inherent subjectivity of artistic appreciation, but people have a perfect right to judge an artist on a work of art, it simply shows a certain closed-mindedness

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#59
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean that it is vague. There is no context, there is only a clickbait title. If you can't parse the context from the writing, there is no context for you.

you are behaving quite patronising to this guy for no reason. He is challenging the premise of the piece and you are telling him he is too stupid to read the piece at all. Do you not see the irony here? Commenters, too, should be allowed to have bad takes

Challenging the premise of the article based on reading only title while not really understanding the language the title is written on is not actually something praise worthy. If he is a.) not reading article and b.) not understanding normal and common English idiom, then pointing out he should stay away from the discussion is valid.

And that is assuming it is genuine misunderstanding and not, like, typical nerdy "I refuse to actual engage with those idiots from other fields, better just make up something".

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#60

I thought this was already the case, considering most "art" is garbage anyways (well, 90% of everything, according to that rule). I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.

Perhaps related, in software development there is the idea of the "Marimba Phenomenon" as first described in the Joel on Software blog [1], where the author observes that: "PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call this the Marimba phenomenon."

So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from.

But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...

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