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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

How is this exploitation? Just asking, I have no opinion.

Art is a weak market that lives already of crumbs from society and this scheme vacuums most of them without adding any value to society in the long term. You could argue that Instapainting doesn't hurt relevant american artists once they live from a diferent market (patrons and benefactors), but by reducing the artists pool, the chances of having important ones reduces also. Why doesn't Instapainting hire american artists?

A developed society needs a developed culture. Adopting European artists and scientists during early XX century helped US affirming themselves.

So American artists (I'm assuming you mean creative people who paint things) want to be paid a lot of money to make something beautiful, and so art made by American artists is expensive and pushed even further to the fringes of society by the economics of it. Thus, it seems to be that people who are buy art are at the intersection of the set of people who can afford it (few) and those that appreciate it (a lot).

This scheme as you so vehemently put it, is really aimed at getting more pretty things on people's walls. To do that, you need cheap and hopefully somewhat unique. Instapainting allows people to have both because they employ non-creative people who paint. I simply can't entertain the idea that the Chinese artists are being exploited by Instapainting by the very notion that they are being paid less than an artist would be in the US.

> Why doesn't Instapainting hire american artists?

Give me one argument why they should. You speak like it's an axiom but I don't see any reason to be a protectionist in this matter. Especially when the customer base is as global as it is (I'm a customer and I'm much closer to China than the US).

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