A little life story:<p>I had commercial success in art at the humble age of 23.
Not only were my paintings respected and collected by accomplished and wealthy individuals, they formed commissions for years to come. My success was the result of an obsession with craftsmanship and clever word-of-mouth marketing.<p>Suddenly, one day after insisting on meeting the deadline of the expensive commission, I had a headache and my nose was bleeding. Fortunately, it turned out to be a minimal problem as a result of stress.<p>I stopped painting for a month and went to rest in the mountains. There I discovered that, influenced by success and the pursuit of perfection, I had lost the most valuable of my talents.<p>To enjoy the process.<p>I then vowed to no longer let the need for material success and validation come before my need to express myself visually and feel enjoyment of the freedom to change my artistic style or experiment without direction.<p>I returned the prepaid orders, apologized for the disappointment I was causing, and moved on.<p>Not only that, but I realized that I would have to work another job if I wanted to keep the purity of the process for myself.<p>I began in graphic design, moved to web design and started a web solutions company.<p>And when my friends ask me to this day: How could you turn your back on your successful art career?<p>I answer them:<p>I don't paint for you. I paint for myself. It's part of my life.
A place where there are no compromises, no demands, no expectations, no projections, no assessments, no tasks, no metrics, no applause and no glory.<p>A place where I am happy.
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.<p>A lot of my talented peers are so much better then me in all of the music and performing stuff, but can't find enough time for it between regular boring work. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up, and it seems true. But now I see how a lot of talented people simply can't afford to show up. They are missing open mics and performing opportunities because they can't skip another shift as a barista, they can't find time for rehearsal because of soul killing the low paying bank job. I keep thinking about all the beautiful songs that are left to be unwritten.<p>I guess the life of artists was always like that - either you are struggling, or you have a source of passive income that carries you through the development years. And I do think that this moment in history is as full of opportunity as it ever was. Still, it was a surprising discovery for me. I really thought that at least at the starting level it would be mostly about who plays their chords better, and it surprisingly isn't.
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 beginners who haven't accomplished much yet.<p>I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me. There are lots of other ways in which people make sacrifices, many more commendable.<p>Being able to express yourself and having an audience is a privilege, not something people need to be shamed into giving you. You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.
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.<p>I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick.<p>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 time for to slowly build an audience for about a decade.<p>Eventually enough folks discovered my work (and found themselves jobs themselves that allowed them more discretionary income) that becoming a self-employed artist became feasible for me.<p>Over three-quarters of my revenue is direct audience support like tips or Patreon. I make enough for my kid to have opportunities my parents couldn’t afford for me—while determining my own schedule and being more available to her day-to-day than my dad could be either.<p>I acknowledge it’s a gamble to buy supplies and spend time to make something, publish it, and travel to meet your audience a few times a year. I admit I’m lucky it paid off for me. But it isn’t as near impossible as the author makes it out to be.
Hi Ahmed, I want to read your piece, but your opening sentence needs some work:<p>>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.<p>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 confused and, ultimately, not reading your work.
There have been a few Spotify-clone studies that showed 70-80% of musical success was attributable to "quality" but the ranking of the top 10-20% was essentially random ("luck" to use the author's word). Now consider Dall-E and other art-making tools. If it becomes easier to make quality art, then the luck factor gets much more important, because the baseline quality is higher. So one can ask whether e.g. the Mona Lisa got famous because it was one of the few quality works of its time. I expect that if someone made a similar-quality painting today they would probably have to sell it on the street. The trend is that art's value goes down but at the same time quality art becomes much more prevalent. Meanwhile economic success becomes even more random.
Per this thread, apparently some engineers really dislike artists. I wonder if this is because artists and engineers both claim expertise in the meaning making process - a painting, or an app. I make my paycheck via that meaningless tech money like most others here, but that aside, I’m under no illusions that I’m doing much beyond solving crossword puzzles for high pay and providing for my family.<p>Every time tech wades into high minded ideals for its products, it seems to find ways to destroy the thing it’s helping, or put another way have extreme negative externalities. Oil and cars connected relatives via ease of travel and caused what looks like one-way pollution. Facebook and Twitter connected people and then did <wave hand, all this>.<p>I think engineers selectively ignoring the above for a long time is a source of extreme disgruntlement later career, and maybe why the artist hate exists?<p>I have never heard of a piece of world changing art have the same negative externalities, or really any lasting negative externalities, as world changing tech.
I don't understand why somehow lots of people are discovering the economics of art as if it's some new situation, when the notion of the "starving artist" has been around for ages.<p>Rewards in creative fields have always been distributed on a very steep pareto curve, and the expected financial ROI across all aspirants is non-positive. This situation isn't some new development of the internet age.
Underrated piece. In many creative or specialized subfields, some of the best work is being done for peanuts or being given away. Prices are generally thought of as ruled by supply. demand, and product quality, but inferring the latter from the first two really only works in terms of commodities that are relatively fungible.<p>Preferential attachment is a large and underappreciated (by most) factor. You could do experiments by uploading the same piece of media under different accounts, both within and across platforms, and using aggressive promotional strategies for one as a kind of A/B testing. One will perform much better than the other.<p>Then follow up with the opposite approach; add another piece of media, and have the less popular account use the more aggressive promotion strategy. It might still do less well, as there can be a halo effect from the previous success.
The article is spot on. To a degree, the world has decided that it's actually not interested in high quality / long form content at all. I want to unpack that brutal statement a little.<p>Distribution: Completely broken. Wherever you look, algorithms are gamed by a small group of people knowing how to play the game. It's incredibly demotivating to see mediocre grifters constantly winning, whilst people producing far better content get no traction.<p>Winning is not winning: say you get lucky and do have a little hit piece, imagine 100K likes. This typically translates into very little meaning. Hardly any new followers, only low quality comments, no real "conversion", donations, etc. The engagement "success" is very inflated.<p>Saturation: People are already on their max screen time, the difference between your awesome work and some lesser work is tiny as it comes to what consumers will do, which is not much at all if everything is endless. Hence deep engagement becomes almost an impossibility. This "Tiktok-ization" of the internet makes this even worse.<p>Popularity: In big spaces where the masses hang out, you're subject to popular taste. A cute kitten will outrank your very best work.<p>Monetization: pretty much nobody will pay for anything even if they directly and deeply engage with your works. Typical donation rates are 0.1% of the actively returning audience. Virtually nobody has an audience size to make this meaningful.<p>So the bottom line is that if you do something high quality, genuinely, out of the goodness of your heart, the internet has infinite ways to encourage you to stop doing that.<p>If you think all of this is bad, just wait what this next AI wave will do.
Who paid for the great works of music in the period between 1700 and 1918? From such musicians as Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Bartok, Handel, Debussy, Bach etc... there were a heck of a lot of great composers in that period. I was analyzing Bach the other day. His Brandenburg Concerto #2 has tens of thousands of notes. That is a heck of a lot of work.
This article seemed poorly written... also somewhat entitled. Few people make a living doing what they want. People give money to those doing what the payer wants, which is poorly correlated with what the payee wants.
"Making a living" is simply doing something that enough people find value in -- the more people and the greater the value provided, the more money you make.<p>Many artists focus on the process of art as one that is for themselves, which is completely fine - but don't expect to make a living out of it unless you are lucky and what you like is also what a lot of other people find value in.<p>Some of the art/music that the author describes as "mediocre" really should be "mediocre to me". Lots of popular music, for example, seems to find a common denominator that can appeal to the preferences of a large number of people with pretty divergent artistic/musical tastes, knowledge, education, preferences, etc. Many people find the music to be very enjoyable -- the author not included, obviously.<p>In that way, art and music can diverge. While successful music often provides somewhat smaller value to a large number of people, successful art can provide large value to a smaller number of people who can afford it.<p>In either case, understanding your target market, their characteristics, preferences, etc, is extremely worthwhile, because if you want to make a living from it, you need to be providing value to others and not just yourself.<p>That's not to say that all art has to be for others, just that you probably shouldn't expect to make a living on it if you have a target market of one.
This piece touches on the inherent tension between originality and selling out (or selling to the masses) that I've definitely seen in comic circles. So many aspiring indie artists/comic creators who think Patreon is their easy ticket to a passive and liveable income when the stark reality is much different.<p>It's why my first piece of advice to any creative is to have a dayjob that maximizes their free time to create freely without financial strings. Even if burnout or predatory publishers don't get you, following the whims of trends is a slow creative death that's far more insidious than the other two.
Phillip Glass was a taxi driver and half of his contemporaries in NY did removals. Loads of these composers are extremely successful AND I've never heard an interview where he talks about how insanely horrible it was/he was entitled to do something else. This isn't going to work for everyone and many of these kinds of jobs are not around anymore so people should be supported to make art and music (e.g. ubi or patrons/foundations).<p>H/w I can't stand the current hipster bs around "pure" artists and muscians (e.g. I only show at X or I'm an IDM genius since I was eight etc). It's very silly and enforces an artificial scarcity that's not good for anyone. You don't have to be a pure artist to be successful, there is no such thing.
I saw a great commentary from an art gallery owner on Tiktok about the "inherent value" of art. The inherent value of art is zero.<p>That is, the art itself has no inherent value. The actual value of a piece of art is whatever you can convince someone to pay for it.<p>One thing that can help is having receipts of what you've sold an artists work for in the past, since you can use that to inflate that amount a current piece will sell for.<p>To put it another way, how good of an artist you are is secondary to how good of a salesman you are (or how good of one you hire on your behalf) when it comes to making a living.
As a music composer, I’m a bit cynical about his statement around artists giving their work out of love for others. As self-expression, art tends to be intrinsically selfish. If other people love it too, that’s even better. But that’s not what I think good artists focuses on. Art is to me the reverse of a business: you expect a market to be created or to exist for the product you decide to create. If you’re good, persistent and a bit lucky, you might succeed.<p>Don’t get me wrong, I love art, artists and want the good ones to thrive.
Online artists, particularly those gunning for a big twitter following, have to hit it with a specific niche to make it big. I've seen people blow up for drawing really great knights, or sexy sea monsters, or for making really cool space ships. The big artists typically have an area of focus that goes viral. Or they are the highest professionals who work on Disney, Pixar, Video games etc.<p>I have a story of watching someone go big on twitter with their art. I met a girl from New Zealand with incredible talent on discord. She painted amazing humans and wonderful creatures. She would paint daily and really struggled with getting a following.<p>One day she posted a cute Pokemon girl with some busty cleavage... the post took off. She got thousands of likes and a flood of followers. She said she didn't want to resort to sexy smut to get a following, but the attention was too powerful. 6 months later she has 30,000 twitter followers and a whole community oriented around her work of drawing sexy Pokemon characters and anime girls with increasingly skimpy outfits.<p>While not the path she hoped for, she found her niche and as such she's made it into the limelight on twitter. So I think the moral of this story is that there is a path for artists to flourish online, but you need to find and target a specific area or interest... or draw lewd babes...
It begs the question of whether software can be akin to art, music, and poetry. While most software just attempts to be functional (minimally at times), at least some programmers take great pride in their work and try to create software that is elegant and interesting.<p>It is kind of like traditional architecture. Most buildings are just designed and built with a purpose in mind with not as much thought into creating a 'work of art'. But there are some really beautiful buildings that get all kinds of awards for how they look. Likewise, most software is just built to accomplish a task; but some is the work of much thought and design to make it do some amazing things.<p>Software is one of those fields where a true 'artist' can have a lot of enjoyment from creating it while still making some money because what they created is not just cool to look at, but provides some real utility.<p>Software 'artists' tend to have two different projects. One is their day job that must be built to someone else's specification. The other is a side project where they can express their creative side and build something really cool.<p>I have such a hobby project <a href="https://didgets.com" rel="nofollow">https://didgets.com</a> that I have thoroughly enjoyed building.
My question for the author is: What do you have to offer the world that is original and compelling? Why should we give you our time?<p>It's fine if there aren't answers to these questions. But if you're going to create something professionally I think they need affirmative answers.<p>Creating is very personal, rewarding, and fun. Those are reasons enough to be creative. But they aren't reasons for commercial success or critical respect.
The 20th century was an interesting time for art. Art for the sake of art became the norm. Historically art has always been paid for by 1) the church 2) the state or 3) the rich. Many subjects in museums are religious, propaganda, or vanity. Even the Sistine Chapel was a job.
Seems a little entitled to me. Why should artists be able to spend their time doing exactly what they want while all the boring plebs have to pick vegetables/write CRUD apps?<p>Sounds like someone is upset that more people dont find utility in their work
I related to the article. Although I have supported myself by working sporadically for companies, I have put a fair amount of effort over the last 30 years into writing books. In recent years, my books are free to people who don’t want to pay for them, with my blessings. I do have a small following, I guess perhaps 3000 people, who pay for more than one of books. I was thinking the other day how nice it would be to eventually double this, but I really don’t care. I get good feedback and connections from people who enjoy my writing for free and I simply want my efforts to be useful. I do look at the distributions of fraction of paid readership for my books, and take that as a signal that those are the books people like the best so I do more revisions and updates for those books.<p>I am blown away how much fantastic amateur or semi-professional talent there is on platforms like YouTube. I believe in technology and a future world with much more leisure time and I expect many people will fill up some of that extra time doing crafts/hobbies, writing, making music, etc. I like de-emphasis of corporate media even if there will always be a place for that. I used to enjoy, long ago, corporate media news, keeping up to date, etc. Now, I skip most of that, listen a few times a month to private sources like Matt Taibbi, and I am very happy to reclaim that time by not listening to unproductive things like MSNBC, Fox, CNN, etc. Often that extra time I get back is just reading books and listening to music.
> Eventually, I realized that it’s not the best work and most original that makes it to top, but rather the mediocre.<p>Not at all true. The "top" work is a successful product, OR it gains a large following regardless of commercial success.<p>Lots of the best ideas are diluted into a mundane product, and plenty of critic's darlings never reach any notable audience.<p>You can put your art into the market, or the court of public opinion, either way you need a thick skin. Jung said artists have large egos because they are so exposed.
Interesting to see this after reading how American ex-pat artists lived in France in the 1920s. They were lucky to have running water. The same for artists in NYC in the 1970s.
This is assuming that people make art as a career. I just released my first music album this week (NOT going to post a link here). I did it for me (well other than the lullaby, which I wrote for my daughter). Art as passion project is still alive and well, and I'm totally fine with chasing the long tail, and going full word of mouth and obscure stumble upon style suggestions to find new things. Certainly works better than listening to marketing.
Art, in its current state, has been fully commercialized in that if you don't have someone who is "in the know," then there is very, very slim chance of being successful. I was briefly in the art world (paintings) and everyone wanted to kiss the successful dealers' asses to get exposure and get a curated exhibition. W/o it, nothing's going to happen. It's sad but that's what it's become.
It's the same when trying to be a professional sports player, streamer, music producer, and many more things. Just don't go into these things thinking it will become a full time job that will pay enough to support you.<p>And for god's sakes, the last thing you want to do is go into debt while paying for an art degree at a liberal arts college that has no vested interest in whether you can get a job that can support you afterwards.
There are places in the world where the art/author scene is thriving. For example - there's only 30K journalists working for 6K newspapers in the ENTIRE USA[1], which is a rather tiny, pathetic number if you think about. it. Whereas in developing countries such as India, that number is much, much higher. Newspapers and media are a growth industry in India. Whereas in the USA, newspapers are shutting down at the rate of 2 per week. Since the average Indian is very likely to read an English newspaper, it paradoxically makes sense for American journalists to relocate to India and practice their craft there! The canonical posterboy for this case is Anand Giridhardas[2]. His parents, like most Indian immigrants, bent over backwards to obtain a coveted American visa, became citizens and settle down peacefully in Seattle - only to find that their All-American kid, born & brought up entirely in the USA with zero connections to India, decided to become a journalist, went to journo school, then decided to relocate to India & become a reporter over there! I used to be a member of a journo association back in the day, and Anand's name was always mentioned as some sort of puzzle - why would an American kid, that too born to Indian parents who would insist that their kid pursue STEM or medicine so some such stable lucrative profession, end up as a journalist, and even worse, go back to India, when it was so difficult for his parents to immigrate to the USA in the first place ?!<p>[1] <a href="https://whyy.org/articles/us-newspapers-dying-2-per-week/" rel="nofollow">https://whyy.org/articles/us-newspapers-dying-2-per-week/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anand_Giridharadas" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anand_Giridharadas</a>
Well… you can make what people like, and get paid (the mediocre stuff) or make thing you and a few like, and get little money out of it. I think this is how it always has been.<p>With every new platform or tech revolution (like streaming) we hear that now it is the little guys turn. But the opposite happens, the big ones take an even larger share.<p>Maybe I misunderstood the article, it was hard to read for my mediocre mind.
You can certainly be a working artist. Get paid to create things for someone else while doing your own thing on the side. I thought this was pretty much the standard, you were either a working artist or a starving artist. The big stars that can make a good living from patronage is small compared to artists overall.
I resent the implication that my 9-5 depletes me of resources!<p>Construction is a wonderful industry for artists. You do labour, which is exercise, communicate with people well outside your bubble, and get paid a damn pretty penny for it!<p>I am certain that our energy resources are greater than they appear, and that dealing with a shitty customer / manager is much more depleting than work itself.<p>The beautiful part is that the customer (client) is almost never there, and construction managers more often than not just aren't that shitty, probably because they know you can just leave and get another decent job the next day.<p>N.B. probably not as good in small cities, or anywhere with low economic movement.<p>Artist workers of the world unite!<p>EDIT: it's actually (and quite commonly) a 7-3, which i personally think beats a 9-5 any day of the week...
"I have the impression, as some others have taught me, rather than through my own intuition, that what ‘makes it’ is something that fits the most common denominator."<p>Very likely true. Often the most-creative artists are out on-the-edge. Escher for one example. Unless that 'edge' is riding an arriving zeitgeist (like the Beats), the artist may die before recognition ... like Schubert, like van Gogh. Such artists are often not gifted with self-promotion and negotiation skills (and struggle with finances).<p>Usually the people most capable of arousing interest are not endowed with vision (or great advisors, like kings and emperors). And so the trendy buuut less-than-new 'wins' by virtue of mere novelty. And we all lose.
>Seems like in order to practise their art, they need a reliable but remedial job to pay the bills. Unfortunately, the nature of that kind of work is energy depleting zapping any creative juices needed for the concentration and initiative to produce content.<p>I'd highly recommend quitting your job. 10/10 experience.<p>Just make sure to check your funds war chest before hand.
I find a bit annoying how artists tend to think their craft is ~so important to humanity and that their originality is the engine to new creations. There is this idea that they provide immense value to us and I just don't see that. Sure, I do love the entertainment they offer us, but that's about it.
isn't this just markets? people don't like your stuff soooo...? you can maybe blame exposure and bus in recommendation algorithms or the randomness of life but I'm not sure if that's really a great article
The most obvious question should be “is what I do valued by society? Are the opportunity costs low enough?”. But, nah, it is all about social injustice. The level of narcissism is astonishing.
This is why you have actors who are the children of billionaires. And even Armie Hammer, as one of them, can't find time to be an actor because he's so busy having a breakdown.
Art is a service industry. I'm into electronic music and it's interesting to think about the youtuber's I watch, who very likely make most of their money from not music. I think we as a society should aspire to art that pushes conventions or makes us uncomfortable, but it also seems somewhat anti-human to think that people shouldn't pay for what they like. "Art that appeals to the lowest common denominator is popular" is just a practical, self-evident statement. Sometimes I think trying to get away from this and idealizing that it should be the best art and not the best marketed art that should be popular is arrogant. I think this is why a lot of artists end up moving to big cities, sure, to find opportunity, but also to find a community of people you can share your art.<p>I think there is this perception that some people - Ed Sheerhan or Skrillex just get to be uniquely themselves, and maybe they do. This is kinda the thing about living in a big complex capitalist system. I think we can all see that as consumers of art that our limited reach and sharp opinions are one of the beautiful things about being human, but it's hard to see it from the other side.<p>I don't know if it's sad or hopeful or human. I certainly wish I could quit my job and make music for a living. I don't really know what the answer is, but at the same time, I think it's like the if you build it they will come thinking that comes with building a startup.
The system is mostly pay to play. However, it is not really art that's the problem. It is the platform on which to display your art where things get complicated. It's rather like first have the talent to paint a Mona Lisa, then have the talent and time to shove it in everyone's face on social media in the hopes someone recognizes how great you are. In the meantime, crowdfund and keep track of all your accounts so the newly formed IRS gun mafia doesn't come knock on your door requesting your nothing.
Freedom to be an artist is exactly the same as freedom to be a parasitic slob.<p>Say we do UBI program.<p>What's the minimum percentage of artists/opensource-coders/gardeners to make it worthwhile?<p>1 out of 1000?<p>What if we suddenly had 1000 new Edisons and Picassos running around? Would that be cool?
~ A take ~<p>"Quality" is what we say when what succeeds is not what we think should succeed.<p>There's an actual objective function that defines success: that's fitness. Quality is what we call the difference between that one and the one we'd like. Expecting everything to rearrange itself to use our function is a high-"quality", low-fitness strategy.
You're right. It sucks.<p>I think I might have stumbled on the impossible miracle passive income technique you're referring to, though. I'm trying to get some traction, but it's hard because of virality filters. Please could you take a look at this and see if it matches your experience?<p><a href="https://gitlab.com/bartokio/bartok/-/blob/main/StartSomewhere.md" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/bartokio/bartok/-/blob/main/StartSomewher...</a>