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

How to make a living as an artist

essays.fnnch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 130 posts

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#71

Post by ilamont »

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 costs". These knobs are what you see through the business lens, and when approached this way it is clear that there is nothing magical about being an artist — it is simply a different configuration of those knobs.

Hard, hard disagree.

Art and art-adjacent fields (storytelling in print and film, music, videogame design, etc.) are working with intangibles. The best artists wield qualities such as technique, perspective, charisma, zeitgeist and so on.

They build their creations in ways that they can't truly explain, and the resulting "product" generates emotions in their audiences - pleasure, sorrow, joy, energy, nostalgia, melancholy - and bonds that are so strong that they can't help but be drawn to the works.

Another way of looking at this dynamic: No one needs to listen to a favorite song, or visit an art museum, read a book by a talented author, or replay a beloved game in the same way that they may purchase a light bulb or sign up for a SaaS subscription. Yet TFA is treating art as merely another type of manufactured product.

Businesses have tried to harness art for millennia. Sometimes the businesses succeed. But where they often fail is assuming that art is a fungible commodity that can be created through an algorithm or assembly line, with the creative flame locked down and bent completely to the will of a business executive or technical product manager.

Such efforts from the likes of game studios or a record company or AI are derivative by nature and rarely inspiring. The exceptions are those built by creators whose intangibles still manage to shine through, despite the harnesses placed upon them.

I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who has worked in book publishing, news media, and pop music over many years (including a stint working for The KLF's record label, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932055)

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#73

Post by luqtas »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #63
dimgl wrote: post #3

Good post. I'd argue this is very similar to solo game development. There's a lot of extra administrative stuff that simply has nothing to do with actually making games and a lot more to do with making a real business. So the framing there is accurate.

One difference is that video games often take a lot more investment - at least a full-size, not-a-game-jam one. That is, the risk and upfront investment can be a lot higher. But then I'm sure that with artists it's also years of slowly building up skills, reputation, contacts, etc - the author himself seems to imply he basically got lucky with the honey bear, and I feel it's the same with e.g. video games. Quality wi…

> quality wise a lot of games are fine

aren't most of these just direct copies of some other game that went famous? e.g. Dark Souls set a genre "souls-like", Stardew Valley copied an old game but we can say they started the resurgence or development of cozy management games...

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#74

Post by Barbing »

xvedejas wrote: post #18
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…

As a resident of SF I've only ever heard of fnnch in the context of people hating his art (I still don't understand why). Is it a case of any publicity being good publicity?

Oh, it’s the plastic bear honey jar artist

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#75

Post by InkCanon »

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.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#76

Post by renato_shira »

dimgl wrote: post #3

Good post. I'd argue this is very similar to solo game development. There's a lot of extra administrative stuff that simply has nothing to do with actually making games and a lot more to do with making a real business. So the framing there is accurate.

[flagged]

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#77

Post by grvbck »

RupertSalt wrote: post #17
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…

In the days of the Beatles, and throughout the heyday of the recording industry, the artists and their management pursued "hits", to be sure, and wanted to be seen on the Billboard charts and in rotation on the radio. But that was secondary to sales figures. It was the RIAA that certified sales figures and awarded the Gold Record, Platinum, and Double Platinum prizes. There were various formats that records could be…

> So you could sell singles with one hit song, and this would propel the "B-side" into people's homes as well

And that's also how Queen almost broke up in 1975. (Roger Taylor making just as much money from singles for writing "I'm in love with my car" that Freddie Mercury for writing "Bohemian Rhapsody".)

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#78

Post by bananaflag »

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…

> This is obviously not the case for art projects that target only a few people, or art practices that do not result in tangible objects.

Indeed, it's not like Tolkien worked on the Silmarillion for four decades before LOTR was published because he was trying to sell it.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#79

Post by ch4s3 »

bananaflag wrote: post #78
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…

> This is obviously not the case for art projects that target only a few people, or art practices that do not result in tangible objects. Indeed, it's not like Tolkien worked on the Silmarillion for four decades before LOTR was published because he was trying to sell it.

Well he was also a professor at Oxford, which is a luxury not afforded most artists.

Re: How to make a living as an artist

#80

Post by scythe »

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 author is fairly clear about it to me:

>One of the biggest mistakes I see artists make is painting things that don't resonate with people. Once you have an aesthetic that works, the market rewards you for exploring adjacent aesthetic territory. You might not make a living right away — it took me over two years from when I painted that first Honey Bear until I took my art full time — but it is totally necessary if you are to make a living off your own art (as opposed to teaching or commercial art). Until then, if what you're doing isn't resonating, you just need to just paint something else. Experiment with different concepts and directions until you find something that works.

He doesn't spend a whole lot of time deliberating on the literature versus television question, but it's easy to see what he's chosen.

Post reply on HN