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.

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.

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.

To enjoy the process.

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.

I returned the prepaid orders, apologized for the disappointment I was causing, and moved on.

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.

I began in graphic design, moved to web design and started a web solutions company.

And when my friends ask me to this day: How could you turn your back on your successful art career?

I answer them:

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.

A place where I am happy.

So I came to the similar conclusion of playing only for myself and my family, and I am much happier with music as a result.

I recommend to anyone working on talent-development to try, the next time inspiration strikes, creating your next piece of art for an audience of one (Self) and see what happens. The results may surprise you.

> A place where there are no compromises, no demands, no expectations, no projections, no assessments, no tasks, no metrics, no applause and no glory.

> A place where I am happy.

I have immense respect for you. I did something along these lines too: switched fields so I could write software for myself. The same reasons you listed resonated deeply with me.

So, I think about how I could only write the software I want to write a decent amount.

What did you do?

I've been programming since I was 14, I really love computers but the business aspect really turns me off. I can do it well if I need to but it just doesn't interest me like the operating systems, programming languages, virtual machines...

So when the time came for me to choose between a career in technology or something else like medical or law school, I chose something else. I'm somewhat comfortable now, still developing my career. I come here every day to read and talk about technology and sometimes I'll even publish a project on GitHub. Still wonder what it would have been like had I made a different choice.

All of my colleagues (at the company) share the same mentality, we all work for money/resources. Most of us don't use any form of enthusiasm or emotional projection on a business task. We use a craftsmanship approach towards a product building. We strive to produce quality. It sounds banal, but it's true, and it works for us.

This is completely normal. There is a conflict between what you know on a deep level and the false consciousness you are required to uphold, and that you do uphold by completing the work.

The ground truth is that, even though your boss probably isn't a bad or mean person, he too has a boss, who has a boss, and following the chain one almost always finds a vested interest in a corrupt status quo whereby a small set of hereditarily connected rent-seekers who stifle progress and don't care about anything but expanding their own wealth and power.

You can make money by collecting small donations from normal, decent people, but there aren't that many to go around, because the fact is that normal humans have almost no economic freedom. Modulo a rounding error, all money is blood money: it comes either from wealthy people and corporations who have evil intentions, or from governments that might have decent intentions but have been corrupted by evil psychopaths from the private-sector elite.

The fact that rich people are paying us to do something is as strong a signal as there could be that what we're doing is poisoning the world, possibly in a way we don't fully understand. Plus, any time we do something as a subordinate, we know that if we perform too well, we are sending a signal to people who are humiliating us (even if in a superficially professional and kind way) that treating us as subordinates works, and encouraging them to humiliate us even more.

The only reason the system doesn't collapse in an afternoon is that we're indoctrinated into bourgeois false consciousness. But something tells me you knew that already.

Case in point, posted here just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479652

Sometimes it feels like there's only two options: become one of these rent-seekers or find a way to opt out of this system.

This is not the response I expected, and doesn't even really speak to what I asked. "How did you work more on the things you wanted to?" doesn't mean I expect to somehow magically only ever get to do what I want.

"Rich people paying us" automatically equaling evil is just such a weird thought. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and someone's got to do the work of keeping them alive, and most of that work is not going to be fun work someone wants to do.

That's reality. We're already lucky we get to write software instead of cleaning sewers or whatever. You can debate how necessary a lot of the jobs that exist are or aren't, or how wealth is distributed in society, but the fact that jobs exist that people don't really want to do isn't the result of some evil conspiracy cooked up by a cabal of rich people... it's just physics. Someone has to grow the vegetables.

If I paid you to garden tomatoes for me, is that "a signal" that I'm "poisoning the world"? If you don't like gardening, but I pay you enough that now you'll do it, does that somehow make me evil?

Weird, man.

Technology is a good thing. Industry is a good thing. We can keep them.

What we don't need is the ruling class. They take the lion's share of the resources, and they don't do anything useful to justify what we pay to subsidize their pampered existences. We can rip them out and things will still work.

I have a child who is enormously gifted and could probably follow precisely the same career path you described. I fear/hope that child will make the same decisions you did.

That's me with programming.

I would of course love to links to your art if you're up to it

> the nature of [needing to put bread on the table] is energy depleting zapping any creative juices needed for the concentration and initiative to produce content. Let alone something of high-quality that doesn’t exude fatigue.

That sounds idealistic to the point of foolishness. The end result of your decision to quit art was that you had to get a job as a graphic designer. Doesn't that achieve even less of your vision?

A lot of people encounter this same dilemma: "do I want to conform to an imperfect system in order to stay in my chosen profession, or should I quit?"

By choosing to quit, you are giving up all of your leverage. You will be replaced by the next "yes man" who doesn't share your vision. If you stick with it, you can continue to nudge the system in the direction you want.

It sounds like they just want to paint what they want, the way they want, and now do exactly that.

All this other stuff sounds like projection of your own concerns, and in pretty unfriendly language to boot.

When you have a talent and a habit/routine, you can keep your form for years.

It is like muscle training, every day simple routine is more effective than two days in a week in the gym.

And my goal is to stay in shape and create something meaningful for myself, not to win the Art Olympics:)

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.

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.

I've met plenty of stock brokers and engineers that skate by on credentials - I try to avoid them professionally because they tend to produce workplaces with exceedingly high demands and low compensation due to the drain they introduce on the system... but they continue to exist.

Heck, HN has many time had discussion on C-level folks who basically revolving door their way from failure to failure and still get huge golden parachutes when they sign on to a new company even though their performance history is trash.

It's not really a new situation for us. This war continues for 8 years, and all this time the front was about 200 miles from us. During this new phase of the invasion the frontline got a little closer to Dnipro, but not that much.

Regular life here stopped in winter-spring, when we didn't know which cities will withstand this phase of the invasion. Tragically Kherson, Mariupol and many others are lost as of now. But we in Dnipro were lucky enough and life kind of continues here.

There are changes of course. Practically no artist in Ukraine gets paid now at any level. Every single concert is for charity, gathering funds for arms or refugees. And, as with all other life, there are constant interruptions of air raid sirens.

Other than that, music scene lives as usual. People still go to concerts and artists still perform. Predictably a lot of sad sad songs gets written now, but honestly no one really wants to hear them - everyone here gets enough negativity from everywhere else. The best bet is to stick to the happy and hopeful stuff.

And, let's take a stronger look at the UK, for example. Can you name a few people who were on the "dole"? I can start with J. K. Rowling and Noel Gallagher, to start.

Any data about overall artistic / entrepreneurial output comparing Scandinavian countries vs others? Asking genuinely.

Have you got any data about how Finland stands out in artistic output vs other countries? Or just random anecdotes which can be found even in countries without any welfare.

Most importantly ... wealthy parents ;)

And she like paints or something. But that notion also devalues domestic housework, which is just as valuable as typing all day to make ad revenue go up.

But I would still like to think a stay-at-home parent could carve out more time for their hobbies. Particularly once the kids are in school.

Being a music person like me, I totally would love to have classical pianist as a wife and just come home every day to hearing classical piano.

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.

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.

First, You’re arguing that rational labor input-output, the harder the better, and the resulting inputs it creates into a system, is the highest ideal or something. You’re missing that Art and various abstractions, to include the social sciences have played a major role in shaping history and our self identities for all of human existence (Homer, anyone?). When this missing started occurring is right around the ‘06 tech boom that put engineering and input output above all else, and by extension destroyed out the protected spaces artists could function in. Coincidently, that’s right around the time the world started to lose its mind by finding meaning making via their iPhones. This engineering-centric dismissal of everything that can’t be quantified is the cause of so many social issues. Your view was also directly present in the Soviet Union, fwiw.

I’m not sure what artist insulted you or wherever this take comes form, but you’re really missing some key points of why Art and the resulting high minded artists have existed since the cavemen.

To me, an average artist/band/... is at best, like an average roofer in the world where there are more roofers than houses - they are unnecessary and should do something else, or admit that roofing or art is just a side hobby. At worst, an average artist/band/... (the kind that the GP mentions, and I've certainly met) is like a roofer insisting that their personal roof that they are building on the ground level over a sand pit is inherently noble.

I think a better example is sports. On one hand, football players get paid a ton of money, by people who presumably consider it worthwhile, for "just playing a game once a week". On the other, imagine every relatively unimpressive rando on deviantart or whatever played football instead, on the same relatively unimpressive level. Do we need so many football players? Sure, they can do it as a hobby, but in terms of social value/making a living, we certainly don't.

Nobody asks roofers to work for "exposure."

Nobody's telling roofers that a penny per shingle / tile would be "entitled" of them (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... ).

Nobody's arguing that roofers should agree to roof for a pittance and come up with some "hustle" like t-shirts or other roofing merchandise in order to enjoy the privilege of roofing.

People do ALL these things with artists.

Labor should be paid, that's true. Trade work is valuable, sure. Craft is a matter worthy of respect, certainly.

But the idea that most artists (outside of a small fraction) are somehow privileged is so far from the truth that it isn't even wrong.

Labor is undervalued all the time, especially if someone has no experience with it and does not understand the amount of time necessary for getting something done. And if you are young and starting your business, they try to exploit you even more. This is not limited to art. And Internet just intensified this, as now you have not only the cheapskates from your neighborhood, but of the whole world. Though, with art there is also the part that some people are not seeing it as a real job, but only as a hobby or something you do for our own enjoyment. So they are even more willing to undervalue it.

The same forces that mean those people "laying down cement in 100 degree weather" often can't actually "put a roof over their family's heads" are the forces that keep poor artists for existing in this society.

I believe it's mostly critics who look for "higher truth" in art?

Do roofers need support?

Lots of beginners in every field think that they're God's gift to whatever it is that they've just started. They're going to change the world, etc. That comes with the territory of being a beginner. Usually they mellow with age and experience.

>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.

Just because you don't see the hours of training and production that goes into something, doesn't mean it isn't there. I might spend 10,000 hours practicing to spend 200 hours writing a novel that you read in 20 hours. I might spend four years in college and ten years writing a computer program that you'll use once. Lots of artwork is produced as work for hire. That doesn't make it that much different than any other job. A trained professional getting payment for services rendered is how things have worked since antiquity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was commissioned to, not just because he was expressing himself

> You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.

You see signs asking you to support local roofers all the time. What do you think all of those commercials on radio, television, print media, billboards, etc. are that advertising all of the roofing services?

Roofers produce roofs. Chefs produce food. Artists produce art. It takes labor to produce art, and if you want good art, it also takes years of training and practice. But somehow working to produce art is seen as 'lesser' than doing manual physical labor.

It's weird. It's expected that in most professions even beginners deserve to get paid. But the arts are somehow different. There's this expectation that artists should produce works for the benefit of society (and don't forget, 'art' is much more than just drawing pretty pictures, it's also the vast field of fine art, music, movies, television, writing, and a lot of other media) but that the work should be free. There's this unspoken feeling that since lots of art is easy to appreciate, it must have been easy to create, so paying for it is a waste of money. But have you ever tried to paint a picture? Compose a song? Write a novel? It's hard. It takes time. It can take thousands of hours of practice before you make anything good.

It's kind of like arguing that a programmer asking for money for the programming work that they do is somehow shaming people into supporting them for typing all day instead of doing real work that commands real pay like bricklaying or cattle ranching.

its kinda good that it is expected that way. art is placed at the level of love. u dont want love to be offered on the market. somehow that feels wrong even when its legal (eg., prostitution) and serving some purpose. artists need a society that appreciates that creativity is a gift and its source is mysterious. the society would then allocate a certain % of income to support the arts. but we now have a society that is each man for himself in a dog-eat-dog world.

I value art because it communicates something from an actual human being, like an exchanging between consciousnesses. When I can derive the choices of an author or photographer or any other class of artist, I find a mutual perspective that, at the root of it, makes me feel understanding and understood.

This article (posted here a few days ago) has a great argument on why AI art isn’t art:

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/ai-art-isnt-art

There’s more to art than the mere appeal of an image to random people. Some great art is disturbing, but it is emotionally resonant. No doubt some of these AI images are quite neat to look at, but they’re basically assemblages, high tech collages. It’s a futurist parlor trick.

Philosophically art requires consciousness and a conscious will to express something. These AIs aren’t conscious and don’t make art.

Frankly humans and animals generated by these things look like blurry trash or are wrong on details in a way a human wouldn’t be, even intentionally. I’ve yet to see examples that don’t look kind of shitty.

There are plenty examples on the DALL-E subreddit that put the majority of Deviant Art artists to shame.

The best looking ones in general feel like banksy painting a character into a flea market painting, collage.

Again, this shit isn't art it's images with mashed together elements built by a system that has no sense of what it's doing. It's cool and all, but at best it's a pale imitation of a thing.

https://nypost.com/2013/05/15/43-8-million-for-this/

My point still holds that anything vaguely representational looks kind of bad and has an uncanny quality. It’s clear that the trick is a kind of collage in most of the images I’ve seen.

Until AI has a sense of good taste and can carefully blend multiple styles into a new genre, the human cannot be replaced. And at that point we're basically at the singularity.

Programmers are simply paid what they get paid because businesses they work for can make up that cost (of paying programmers the salary) with profit multiple times over, using the work produced by those programmers.

Yes, and no. There are entitled developers who think they deserve more than the average worker. And there are those developers who delve into their "Devine art" and are cranky because the world does not appreciate it. Usually those people are to be found around the more exotic languages it seems.

Art and IT have a big intersection from my experience. And majority of people in IT and also art are not entitled, nor are they on the Divine Train. It's just that as an outsider, you barely encounter those people, because of which it's harder to get a good picture of the art-scene.

But, to +1 the other poster, programmers can be just as deluded as anybody else about their own importance, we don't have to indulge that either.

Too bad I’m not a Roman Emperor, or else I’d host weekly public bouts where I’d pit them against one another in a fight to the death.

An economy is not a society. There is more to the human experience than "number goes up".

I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would call it realism, not pessimism.

> I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick.

Congratulation on making it, But that's the survivorship bias the article mentions. For every one like you, there are a thousand who did not make it, and will never make it. Should they stop trying because of this? Nope. But should they be aware of this and not bet their whole life on their art? Definitely yes.

There are far too many people living in the decision that they just need to make an attempt or hustle for a short while, and they will swim in money and fame. And too many of them invest their life, money and future into this. I know some of them, and have seen where it ends. Realism is not pessimism, it just keeps you away from the darkest parts of life by pointing at darker parts.

It's incredibly difficult, and not at all like arts as a hobby. I think it is terrible advice blindly telling folks to pursue arts because it makes it seem reasonably achievable, and sets people up to waste far too much of their time becoming miserable with real consequences for themselves and those around them.

If someone is discouraged by the "don't do it" advice that easily, then they were likely not going to be making it their full time employment.

And the folks who have the drive and determination to see their goals to the end that aren't going to be dissuaded by some random person on the internet or at a conference telling them they are going to fail.

Robin Williams had advice like that all the time, and along the same lines I really thing Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' is incredibly beneficial to anyone at the beginning of a career path.

I know a person who makes upper 5 figures at her day job and makes about that much writing zombie romance novels (as in, the main character falls in love with a zombie) for online publication. Clearly, it's her niche, but it's also a hobby that she's been able to buy a house with.

My advice to them is that if there is anything else they can do, do it. Being a professional actor is miserable. The odds are it will fail entirely; most of the remainder will barely make subsistence.

Much of what I do is to provide a place for people to be genuinely creative in ways that they couldn't afford to if their living depended on it. We get to take artistic chances that please us. You don't get that if your livelihood depends on it.

A few people have taken my advice and concluded that they needed to do this. Some have had minor successes. Good for them. Others tried and discovered that indeed, it was not fun and not good for them, and they left. None, fortunately, are starving, convinced that persistence is the key to success because they read it on a motivational poster.

All theatre, even (and especially) Broadway exists only because rich people funnel free money into it. Regionally as donors, and on Broadway as "investors" who almost never make a return.

It is a rich people's hobby and for those who do make a career out of it, it's lottery winning odds to be middling comfortable. One percent of one percent become well off.

You may also notice, as an audience member, that it is almost universally terrible entertainment. It just sort of shuffles on through the centuries with an occasional Hamilton and lots and lots of wealthy networking opportunities.

He emphasized again and again he isn’t rich because of his movies. He made outside investments than turned out well.

He made it pretty clear any future movies he makes will he self-funded and at a loss.

So even Hollywood is at the mercy of donors.

>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.

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.

People need to be able to receive constructive feedback and improve, without feeling attacked.

I did not detect snark, or superiority in this feedback comment. Instead, it seems to genuinely attempt to offer constructive feedback.

The parent pointed out a specific fragment that needs re-work, which is an actionable item for the OP. Perhaps it could have been framed more positively, but constructing a place where people cannot offer direct, actionable feedback is quite unhelpful for all involved.

Otherwise, I agree that it appears helpful and applicable.

There is a steady, near linear association with “quality” (no matter how you abstract this definition), and then the more exponential gains are typically exceptional instances with more unique circumstances for how they were measured along this portion of the curve.

Another widely measured example is income. Most people have jobs with increasing pay commensurate with market demand, but the top have exceptional combinatorial factors involved: e.g. they are BOTH highly skilled AND own a business or have some obscure high risk job, were an inventor of something, receive substantial trust fund income, etc.

The more boring way of stating this is… exceptional results are by definition exceptional.

But, in general, while there's a lot of variation in musical styles/art styles/etc. that a given person likes, I find that there's fairly broad agreement that an expert list of, say, the 50 top classic rock songs are pretty good--among people who like classic rock even if they might disagree on the order.

Monopolistic mass media which reaches hundreds of millions of people is weird. Like most of the mid 20th century we should be cautious about using it as typical of anything.

What's more, the canonization of these thinga has caused our modern media to refrence and reflect them. Meaning we likely have a predisposition towards them as their structure and tropes are familiar to us. Your popular measure of quality is terribly tainted.

How much time have you personally spent digging into obscure classical music or have you mostly listened to the cannon? I can say I certainly have stuck to the big names. But the big names of today weren't universally heralded in their time. In fact the reputation of art changes with the time.

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>.

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?

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.

It seems obvious to me that hardly anyone primarily cares to pay for the self-expression of any other, except perhaps for their close ones. With media, the market pays primarily for aesthetic value, communicative ability, branding value, socio-political expression, store of money, etc., rather than for the self-expression of the author.

Nobody else really expects to get paid for self-expression itself; on the other hand, most of us commission others to express ourselves, e.g. in fashion or decoration, or at the very least in our own materials and time for something that has no value to others. So it seems privileged to me to expect to be paid in a sustainable manner for primarily doing something that most people have to pay others for.

My first guess is that this is because "the art experience" is far more transient at the individual level. With the introduction of, say, WhatsApp, there was a paradigm shift in how we're able to contact people around the world and it doesn't go away. Even the most provocative piece of art is only experienced in the moment and maybe, maybe, causes you to reflect on your perspectives for a little while afterwards.

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.

source: artist

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.

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.

There are several effects at play affecting an art pieces ”market worth” and ”quality and skill of the art” is only one component.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa

Making money in music isn't that much different from making money in tech. This very day there is/was a post on the front page about Adam Neuman(sp?) getting bankrolled yet again. Why? Because he is described as the world's greatest pitch man.

Likewise, crypto. Who's making money? The smartest programmers? or the people who know how to promote their projects?

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.

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.

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.

Popularity: In big spaces where the masses hang out, you're subject to popular taste. A cute kitten will outrank your very best work.

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.

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.

If you think all of this is bad, just wait what this next AI wave will do.

Like even Wagner who is arguably one of the most influential and popular composers of all time spent most of his life destitute and only was stable when the Kaiser himself was sponsoring him.

I think in the same way though this speaks to something deep and profound about music, I once heard the saying "You can buy anything in this world for money" and I think that the problem we have pricing music has to do with how transcendental it is, it is designed specifically to convey or share something that transcends mere language or description, musics purpose is to communicate from one soul to another in a way that is deep and meaningful, that touches people and brings them in alignment and helps people see that which we can't quite understand in normal life.

It is beautiful, and I think the attempt to commoditize music, make it corporate and subjugate it to the whims.of the market end up making music a little less musical.

And having a market like this for a while bought us an incredible bounty of all kinds of music, some incredibly sophisticated, some with subtle & important things to say, some with all the art of a schoolyard taunt, some finding both wide and deep appeal.

If the conditions were unusual, so was the harvest -- bountiful enough that hopefully people will give a second thought about dismissing such conditions simply because they're potentially ephemeral (especially given that so are we).

As for commodification: it's different from monetization. It's distinguished by fungibility; muzak for grocery stores, elevators, hotel lobbies, customer service calls, etc being the greatest example, but of course some pop music is disposable too. And yet people don't always know the difference in advance (art is tricky in that way). In any case, monetization which rewards successful indelible efforts provides a powerful reinforcement for creators who have a knack for things people value or even find transcendent.

> You can buy anything in this world for money

In the story where I heard this, that's something the devil says, and while the devil isn't above telling you the truth, he's much more likely to say whatever he needs to (true or false) in order to get you focused on a model/direction that serves malevolent purposes, like the Cthaeh.

I appreciate you pointing this out the full quote I am referring is "You can by anything in this world for money, so if something can't be bought for money it is not of this world."

I feel like music tries to give us something that is not of this world, which is why we have so many problems when trying to figure out how to price music.

And some of them earned less then they could due to own habit of alienate people (Beethoven).

Not to leave it at criticism, while highly specialized, the excellent lectures of Professor Christopher Page of Gresham College linked on the bottom of https://www.gresham.ac.uk/speakers/professor-christopher-pag... include a lot of details that tell us a lot about more ordinary musicians and (here: guitar) teachers, even if it's mostly about one instrument and a few limited locations and periods of time. A very interesting anecdote in any case, especially given the quality of the presentation(s). It is not explicitly or even mostly about the economic situation, but enough can be deduced from the context.

Einstein was not richer then other physicians. His fame could have help him when emigrating and at keeping employment, but afaik it was not rewarded by super unusual riches.

And how does that invalidate the argument? "Others made the same mistake!" - Yes, and?

> Einstein was not richer then other physicians.

How is this relevant to the argument? (Rhetorical question - it is not)

> And the question was "who paid for the great music of the period".

OP wrote "there were a heck of a lot of great composers in that period". Which is correct - most of the works were from regular people. They were not as outstanding as Mozart or Bach, but still produced a lot of the great music. People like Johann Pachelbel, to give an example. Not in the same league as Mozart, but there were many of the same type and they produced most of the music of the period.

I play recorder and violin and most of the sheet music I play is from those more normal people.

Oh and the parent (buscoquadnary) is not quite correct when he only points to "patronage". A lot, if not most of those people made money with performances (Mozart too! - https://www.biography.com/news/mozart-pauper-lost-fortune) and with teaching.

When King George appointed him Royal Astronomer so he could do astronomy full time, the salary he earned from that position was half what he made as a musician.

https://bachnetwork.org/ub12/ub12-heber.pdf

There were a lot of great composers in that period, but that's over 200 years and there were probably many more who are forgotten or were never even given the opportunity. And today there are probably more songs released on Spotify daily than were written in all of the 1700s.

Wagoners family is still in charge of the Bayreuth festival in Germany.

On top of that, music was not a commodity back then. Live performances literally made a living for many of them as these performances were the only source of music. (And a church needs this music for every mass, for instance.)

Now music is abundant, recordings are cheap / free, and the best performance is easily available in a recorded form. Live performances are still a thing and still feed many of the music creators. Royalties, too. But you better be a superstar for that to bring enough. (Liszt and Mozart were superstars, in a sense.)

Wait until a Dall-E equivalent for music emerges though.

A DJ will arrive with a unique set, likely with every track custom-made for a given gig.

Selling any records at all will become very-very hard, except for rare hits with outstanding human vocal performance. In music clips, music will be relegated to the position of a movie soundtrack, if not lower.

Obviously for anything sort of focus-y, house music downtempo etc. If we're not already there, we'll probably be there soon, though I am curious if a careful listener will eventually notice the uncanny valley problem there. But pop music I'd say has two problems. 1. There's a je ne sais quoi quality that's hard to replicate, and two I imagine the corpus is just not that big. I mean sure, there's a decently large corpus of pop music, but good pop music? how many hip hop billboard charts have there been a thousand, maybe a few thousand. How do you combine Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston into a banger that doesn't sound too much like Beyonce', Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston without the titular character marketing said music.

One of the new genres that really impresses me, is 3D art. The art form is getting quite mature, and often requires as much work as any Dutch Master oil painting.

One of my favorite 3D renderings, is Worth Enough, by radoxist[0]. Nowadays, I'm sure that there are works that beat it, but it was quite amazing, when he posted it.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

Ppl also dont see art where it is in its pure form -Engineering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By the way, at least in my country (Austria) the government also spends money on artists, though I will admit that I am not aware of how big that part of the budget is. Most likely smaller than R&D though.

But in general most people also indirectly fund these things. Want a better camera in your phone? For that you will need better sensors, for that you need better factories, etc. At some point you reach the mathematicians or other scientists that are somewhat far removed from the product.

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.

I switched a few years ago to splitting these apart: I (1) got a non art tech job that I love (which is key) and that pays great, and (2) I started doing pure artistic games on the side as a hobby, no need for money from them.

I am much, much happier. I think many people, my past self included, cause themselves a lot of pain by trying to lump everything together. If someone loves baking pie no one says “When are you going to quit your job and open a bakery?!” It’s just fun! Why does it need to pay the bills?

The first camp is those who believe that you should find a job in a field you love (maybe that's art). The idea is that even if you don't make much, you'll be happy and have the drive to do well.

The second camp is that you should find a field you don't necessarily love, but is more stable/higher paying and thus allows you to comfortably do the things you like in your spare time.

I've heard these two argued to death among students in high school and among parents today. I took the second route and am happy with my choice, though I agree it's not for everyone (really depends on the work you do and whether or not you have the time/energy/will to work on your creative passions).

Decide what kind of life you want to live, then find a job that supports that.

Because life is so expensive for so many that every effort has to have money in mind or they starve. Especially if you are chronically ill (or simply have less-than-average energy levels), meaningful stuff outside work just will not happen.

Most podcasts being created now will probably still fail, but it feels like a nice step away from the current ad-induced hellscape.

there's somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000,000 serialized podcasts. "Most ... fail" is barely descriptive!

I've personally been part of about a dozen musical albums, i've never seen a penny or any recognition for it. One thing i managed to upload to the internet got a third of a million hits, but it was happenstance, not music, and i just happened to edit wikipedia very quickly and have a really good sound file host at the time. It was the "re-awakening" of the UVB-76 "buzzer" in ~2010 - and i can't even remember how i recorded it anymore! Wired magazine and a few other outlets approached me to license the recording. If you've heard the "NAIMINA" recording of UVB-76, that was something that was originally put on the internet by me.

I haven't released a "real" song in over a decade.

I use this recording as part of a strange personal radio station project, it's one of the burst samples I use for flavor. I love that noise. Thanks man!

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.

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.

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.

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.

This goes for any good or service. Usually when people talk about the "value of something" they mean "the price that people are willing to pay for it".

It really seems to be art specifically which people are often keen to describe as worthless, not any particular category of good that artwork might fall into.

Debatable. One of the most popular uses of VR is pornography, which is targeted at one of the needs on the very bottom layer. Other uses are probably mostly serving mid-level needs like social belonging or esteem needs.

It does become a bit circular. Just saying "the value of art is what other people judge it to be" just begs the question "how do those other people judge it?" ad infinitum. When I hear "inherent value", I usually think of a non-monetary value, a value that exists outside a system of multi-party transactions, some utility that is possible even if no one ends up using it.

For art, I believe the inherent value is what it makes you feel. If a piece of art doesn't make you feel anything, it's pointless and useless as art.

So is the inherent value of gold, sans its use in electronics and dentistry.

To get at the real value of art, something that is not a necessity, you would need to somehow query every individual in a way where they had all their needs met and enough expendable income to use on art so that they would seriously consider buying it. But it can't be too much wealth or the situation is trivialized. The context puts a lot of restrictions on when someone is willing to buy an aesthetic good that doesn't provide other functions.

Yet, as a society we can recognize that art benefits us on a social and intellectual level. So a society as a whole may want to patron some artists, regardless of what they make. This is an inert value for art, a recognition from society that there is value there, even if they don't know it exactly and wouldn't buy it for themselves.

But do we? As in, are there artists who receive money regardless of their production?

Even on Patreon, most artists are paid because they're regularly putting out art, not because they exist as an artist. They're being paid to churn out art on a regular basis for their patrons, not for society as a whole.

Don’t get me wrong, I love art, artists and want the good ones to thrive.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I have such a hobby project https://didgets.com that I have thoroughly enjoyed building.

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.

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.

Sounds like someone is upset that more people dont find utility in their work

And why do these "boring pleb jobs" exist? Why doesn’t everyone create and share their creations? This isn’t limited to art. Consider the inventor of insulin sold the patent for $1 because he believed “Insulin belongs to the world, not to me.” Anyone who creates from the heart, artists scientists or otherwise, should be the gold standard that all humans live by. If everyone lived this way, then there would be no need for busy work jobs.

I really, really wish this would happen, but I don't see a way around the bad actor problem. How do you build a human system that supports this that is also robust to exploitation?

Small steps. Acknowledge human nature for better or worse. Acknowledge that humans emulate what their exposed to. Consider cigarette smoking in the US sharply declined once legislation banned it from TV. The same should be done for idols: stop making idols of people based on their net worth. The average Joe knowing who Jeff Bezos is but not Frederick Banting is a failure of the media and education system. So start by promoting better role models and go from there.

I just don't appreciate the sentiment that artists deserve to exclusively make the art they want, the way they want because art holds a special value to society that needs to be supported.

Our society is drowning in art. There are millions of hours of content; videos, photos, drawings, music, books, etc that one can consume at any moment and more is being created every day. With this in mind it's pretty hard to believe that society isn't supporting artists enough.

Sure some artists are poor but many are well off or even rich. You can't same the same for people who pick vegetables which we need to eat to not die

Do you know how much hard work is involved in getting ps4 platinum trophies? So what?

Because it's an excellent investment, socially speaking.

Because investment in the arts (I mean serious investment. Not like USA) has worked pretty well for some countries.

And we're talking all realms of unrestrained creative effort here. Science, technology and stories about dragons. Opensource software as well as basement watercolorists. This is where the shiny new legos of our society come from.

I think that's just misunderstanding cause and effect. It's more that nations "invest" more in art as they get wealthier. It's not that they pay a bunch of people to do whatever they want and tada, the country becomes industrialized.

Perhaps we should invest infrastructure, systems and institutions that give people more free time, flexibility, freedom, and inspiration so they can create good art rather than "investing in the arts"--whatever that means

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.

Not at all true. The "top" work is a successful product, OR it gains a large following regardless of commercial success.

Lots of the best ideas are diluted into a mundane product, and plenty of critic's darlings never reach any notable audience.

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.

I'm a fine artist and would put myself in the "not successful" category. I don't make nearly enough to live off of it but it's inherently something I have to do. I could, and have, done commercial work in the past that I could live off of but I just can't bring myself to feed the content machine.

edit: And although I'm kind of ok with the "not successful" part I think my work is important and should be seen. More than anything my measure of success is to add to culture.

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.

[1] https://whyy.org/articles/us-newspapers-dying-2-per-week/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anand_Giridharadas

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.

Maybe I misunderstood the article, it was hard to read for my mediocre mind.

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!

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.

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.

N.B. probably not as good in small cities, or anywhere with low economic movement.

Artist workers of the world unite!

EDIT: it's actually (and quite commonly) a 7-3, which i personally think beats a 9-5 any day of the week...

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).

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.

I'd highly recommend quitting your job. 10/10 experience.

Just make sure to check your funds war chest before hand.

This is bad prose. It's flowery, self-indulgent, and lacking substance.

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.

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.