How to make a living as an artist • Hacker News Board

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#121

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #105

ilamont wrote: post #71

The breakthrough realization for me was that all businesses are fundamentally similar. They have the same knobs just configured differently. The knobs are things like product, sales channels, marketing, PR, and brand. A jeweler might have high material costs (gold and diamonds), an artist moderate material costs (paint and canvas), and a greeting card company low material costs (paper), but they all have "material co…

It doesn't sound like you're refuting the central claim. Artists still have to be concerned about marketing, sales (i.e. I made great art, but now need to find someone to buy it if I want to eat), revenue, profit (i.e. I made money, but if I spent more than I made on materials then I didn't actually make money), and so on. It's a business. What you're highlighting is that art's value proposition is different from the…

It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business.

Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.

There's a huge cadre of content creators and entertainers who are happy to do that, but - as the previous post says - their work is typically entirely forgettable. Even when it's commercially successful.

And successful original creators usually have business managers to deal with "basic economics."

The ideal for most artists is complete creative freedom and an open budget. Not many get there, and not everyone who does get there produces something memorable. But it happens occasionally, and it's usually far more interesting than create-to-market content.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#122

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

InkCanon wrote: post #75

I think it borders on parody that this hyper capitalist, hype driven mindset (originally found in tech) has not only infected a lot of "art", but they are boasting about it. A more accurate title is how to make a living selling a very specific kind of popular mural/Art Basel/showroom/"elite" kind of art.

Many of the artists on the Art Basel run are nepo babies. Same with academic art, music, and architecture. It's incredibly hard to get into those circles without some kind of independent income and/or cultural networking.

Every so often the invisible hand picks someone off the streets, but it happens much less often than it might.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#123

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #108

helloplanets wrote: post #11

> The Beatles wrote 227 songs, but only 34 hit the Top 10. Do you think they would put out a song that they didn't believe could be a hit? Mozart wrote over 600 songs, but only about 50 of them are widely played. Do you think he purposefully wrote duds? Of course not. This is completely backwards. The Beatles put out songs that they didn't think were hits, and put out songs that they were conscious of being the antit…

More importantly, the Beatles are one of the few groups that I can listen to the entire album and love every song, and then come back 5 years later and still love the album. There are many successful musicians who have a handful of good songs and the rest of their albums are filler.

[deleted]

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#124

Post by wavemode » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #121

wavemode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like you're refuting the central claim. Artists still have to be concerned about marketing, sales (i.e. I made great art, but now need to find someone to buy it if I want to eat), revenue, profit (i.e. I made money, but if I spent more than I made on materials then I didn't actually make money), and so on. It's a business. What you're highlighting is that art's value proposition is different from the…

It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business. Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons. There's a huge cadre of content creators and entertainers who are happy to do that, but - as the previous post says - their work is typically entirely forgettable. Even when it's commercially successful. And successful original creators usually have b…

> It's not a business. Selling art is a business. Making art isn't a business. Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.

Again, you're arguing a distinction which the author agrees with. From the article:

> Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy.

I think perhaps you're getting hung up on some semantic quibble rather than focusing on the broader point. "Artist", "professional artist", "artist for a living", "someone who spends most of their hours making art but also needs to eat". Choose whichever term satisfies your complaint. These people need money to live, that's just how the world works.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#125

Post by cwmoore » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #12

While this advice may work for some, I would like to point out that this person is making very popular art. This type of art is most likely easier to sell than what most contemporary artists produce. Also, this remark is giving away a fairly limited view on art appreciation: > While you can learn from failures, only sales strengthen the muscle because only they show that someone actually cares about what you are maki…

Sure, you are right. For the article author's market, many are literally and metaphorically pedestrian, popular and colorful but uncomplicated.

I read a quotation recently that said in essence, the work of creativity moves from creating something no one else has ever seen or thought of, towards creating new and different insight into something almost everyone already knows about.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#126

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #46

smokel wrote: post #12

While this advice may work for some, I would like to point out that this person is making very popular art. This type of art is most likely easier to sell than what most contemporary artists produce. Also, this remark is giving away a fairly limited view on art appreciation: > While you can learn from failures, only sales strengthen the muscle because only they show that someone actually cares about what you are maki…

> The article does point out exactly this problem, but glosses over the fact that most artists don't want to change to popular art. Only a few can, and most don't want to. I don't think author hides the fact. It's plain as day that to make a living, you need to sell art which resonates with people. You can still find room to be creative within that constraint, but you can't ignore the audience. Artists should quit th…

100%

I didn't understand GP's point at all because I think the author makes this exceedingly clear: if you want to paint only for you, and only stuff that appeals to you and a limited few, that's totally fine (and I think the author really emphasizes that's totally fine), just don't expect to make a living off of it.

I thought this article was excellent. In particular, I liked the emphasis that you really just have to produce lots and lots of art to find "image market fit", because it's nearly impossible to know what will resonate with people before you create it. There is just an undeniably huge amount of luck in finding something a lot of people like, so it's important to give yourself as many swings at bat as possible.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#127

Post by WalterBright » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:05 AM UTC

onraglanroad wrote: post #118

WalterBright wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody wants to pay for X, then X is worthless.

I wouldn't pay anything for any of your family. Or for you. I'm not sure that's a good measure of worth. Unless you think others would? What's the market value for your family?

What you're willing to pay for X is what X is worth to you. It doesn't have to match what anyone else is willing to pay.

It's the basis of the Law of Supply and Demand.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#128

Post by eszed » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

scns wrote: post #60

eszed wrote: post #35

> Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you. Try not to entangle your ego with your art. This is something I wish I could impress upon 23-year-old me. I had all the drive in the world to create , and made some things I knew would (to the right market) sell - and I was, in fact, proved right, a few times - but I felt nothing but embarrassment about the actual selling . It wasn't even that I…

> I'm not completely sure where that comes from - maybe an upbringing in a religious culture that emphasized humility? Empasized humility or crushed any sense of self worth?

No, I wouldn't say that. I knew what I was good at, and like I say was pretty inured to rejection. I had plenty of confidence, but I think it's a show vs tell issue. I'm thrilled to do the first, but the latter makes me squirm. I think, even since my theatre career, that I've lost opportunities to people more comfortable with self-promotion, when skill is equal or even in my favor.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#129

Post by arty_throwaway » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 8:12 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #113

arty_throwaway wrote: post #51

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…

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…

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.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#130

Post by fragmede » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 11:50 AM UTC

hdra wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm being thick here, but i still dont quite get how does he earn money from his artwork? For example, how does he earn from the Honey Bear murals? does the city or building owner commission him for the murals? If so, does he do some kind of outreach or sales call to the building owners or is it the other way round? Not an artist and nor am I in the art world, just curious how does business work in there

A bit of both. You have to go to a lot of dinner parties and salons and high society gf etc togethers, and connect the right people to each other, and serendipity happens, and then, before you know it, you've got a mural on the wall.