I see a lot of "this is the same as my experience with x" where x is CEOs, Academic paper authors, musicians.
Is it time that we own up to the fact that nobody exists in a vacuum? Can we skip straight to the socialism part?
Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
131–140 of 159 posts
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#132As 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 wish the crews would receive more credit as well. A good analogy would be if Hollywood films didn't list credits and pretended that only the director worked on the film and did everything by themselves. It would be insulting for people to believe that a director did 100% of the work on one of their films and ignored the entire crew. Not sure why this doesn't apply to the art world where teams are way more common th…
It's still partially this way, though. Credits in films are often unreliable or incomplete. Rather than simply being a record of history, credits are political and mingled with money, just like everything else.
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#133There used to be cartoons called "The Artist", with a little guy in an artists's smock. One was titled "Each print was produced under the personal direction and control of the artist." The artist is shown, hands on hips, watching an enormous printing press stamping out prints. That's art.
(I once visited a place in Silicon Valley which did just that. I was having boxes made for boxed software, and went to the printing plant. They had a huge multicolor press, about a hundred feet long. This could print not just four colors, but about ten. It could be loaded with inks of different specularity, so you could get shiny gold ink effects and such. The press was busily printing collectible art prints, good ones that looked like paintings. About two per second. The plant mostly did software boxes, but on slow days, they cranked out art.)
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#134In my opinion, what matters is intent when it comes to wether something can be considered art or design, not skill. Art is self centered, to please your own aesthetic sense, design is centered around preferences of other people. If you e.g. paint to impress others, you're not making art, but design your own reputation as an "artist".
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Composer here. This is a terrible analogy. Whether or not a composer can/does perform a piece has absolutely nothing to do with authorship -- do we expect a writer to read aloud their novel? A better question to ask is, "If the composer merely told others what to write, is it actually the composer's music?" This is an unbelievably common practice, and IMO, the answer to the question is no.
What listeners get is not sheet music, it's performed music.
To me it's like an artist provides a detailed plan of how to build a monument, and then certified builders actually construct it.
Of course if an artist just gives a few rough sketches, and then a civil engineer provides the detailed drawings, and the builders construct the monument by them, then the artist is a co-author at best.
I don't know how specific D. Chihuly was in his instructions. I just think that such a separation of labor is possible, when the artist does the artistic stuff, and a performer follows on with the technical execution. In an extreme case, a machine (such as a music box) can play Bach, but that machine can't play without Bach having written the notes.
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can’t see your point at all. Leonardo is the most famous of all the artist/technologists.
OK. What specifically don't you understand? Leonardo being the most famous and still using craftspeople was my point.
“Craftspeople”? You mean his architectural work? He was, by all accounts I’m aware of, an incredibly hands-on artist. Having others help out is one thing. Having others execute is another. Having a workshop (as in, tools, bricks morter, etc.) is just par for the course.
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#137A few friends have worked as technicians for a very well known British artist. As far as I can see he pretty much hires every art graduate within a reasonable radius of his art factory. They do the majority of the production work, to his specifications. Eventually they get bored and leave to do their own stuff. Another guy I know is a sort of 'special projects' consultant for artists, figuring out particular logistic…
Hirst?
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#138Much of the discussion here revolves around whether or not the artist deserves credit for creating a work if it was fabricated by other people, which I think somewhat misses the point.
The issue, I think, lies in the lack of shared credit that's granted in the art world to people whose labor and skills are utilized to realize the work.
Across most of the arts, the work of many artisans, craftspeople, technicians and workers is poured into the realization of an artwork, and across most of the arts those people receive some sort of credit. The film industry is maybe the best example here. In "cinema" the director gets top billing, but ample credit also goes to the screenwriter, cinematographer, sound designer & so on.
"Fine art" is an exception to the rule and I think this has to do with a mythology built around the artist that began in the modern era, coinciding with the movement in European painting from frescoes embedded in architectural setting to oil on canvas and the advent of the art object as a commodity. During the modern era and up through modernism, it became much more common for artists (and painters in particular) to work alone in their studios etc. etc.
Today, the role and scale of art has shifted again, and more craftspeople are often involved in the production of a single artwork than they were in the 1700s through the 1950s, but the mythology and institutional frames available remain stuck on the model of the single creator. I think this is just one of the many contradictions between material realities of contemporary art and the narratives and markets built around them. Maybe (hopefully) we're beginning to call some of that into question.
As an artist who has worked for other artists in the role of fabricator, there is a funny feeling when an artist hasn't touched (much less, seen, in one case!) the artwork that you've built for them until it's displayed under their name. In these cases I've never felt personally slighted, but it's weird knowing that only a subset of people working in the art world - artists, fabricators, gallerists, etc. - understand how many peoples' work often goes into making a big ambitious show. I think film-style credits would be an appropriate acknowledgement and some artists are actually beginning to do this.
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It's an interesting thought experiment about what art actually IS: is art the idea behind the piece? Is it the skill that the individual has in physically bringing the piece to life? If the person with the vision doesn't physically produce the outcome, is it still their art? I sincerely enjoy the fact that people regularly visiting Hacker News think that is an "interesting thought experiment", in the context of ar…
>>On the other hand art is somehow assumed to be a special case in our world. I think this is most due to a romanticized vision of what an artist really is/does. When people think artist, they think of the starving-artist stereotype - locked away alone in their studio pursuing their passion and living in poverty to 'do what they love'. Or, the crazy-genius archetype (think Van Gogh). People attribute creativity to 'n…
> when it's really a skill that can be sharpened the same as running a business like a CEO would
Running a business is not the same as visual art, literature, mathematics, physics. Most people will spend years sharpening their skills at these things and never produce something of note. It's not romantic to say this, it's just the way it is.
Re: Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?
#140As 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.
As a former artist I agree.
I think what people don't see when they compare art to another industry like software, engineering or architecture in their examples is just how much work will go into a specific piece of art and just how corrupt the current art establishment is.
Technical skill is hidden away to the point where people don't even really know the involvement of artists when it comes to stuff like art technicians. In fact I had a tough time convincing people I know that cgi isn't "all done by computers" and that actually the level of raw artistic skill in videogames is unbelievably high.
I think it's right to be upset about credit being apportioned fairly. If a person is able to pretend they created a work of art whilst someone else profits off of it then that behavior will only be encouraged. Fundamentally though the decision does rest with the individual artists in question who offer their work up to people who give them no recognition. Ultimately if they're ok with it then perhaps there isn't a problem, but if not, then they should find a way in which to work where they are fairly rewarded for their efforts. Expecting the system to change or expecting people to stop taking advantage of others is unlikely to change anything.