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Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

At the other end of the price spectrum, albeit at a much smaller scale, Andy Warhol used this business model quite successfully. He even called his studio the Factory.

And in Damien Hirst's studio, his "assistants" (i.e. artists) churn out countless spin and dot paintings which are sold as original artworks for thousands of pounds.

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The concept of artists having assistants or working like this being novel at all is a very new concept. Up until very recently, art was a professional practice in the western world and it was not uncommon (and very accepted) that artists would work with a team of apprentices, sharing the workload and focusing on specific details and elements with the artist applying the finishing touches and signature.

Takashi Murakami [1] is doing much the same with Kaikai Kiki [2]

I think a lot of people (especially artists) don't realize or maybe don't like that in order for an artist to scale, they have to bring in help. As much as it sounds like the commercialization of a craft, I think these structures are important for the art economy to survive in this modern era of on-demand everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami [2] https://www.wired.com/2003/11/artist/

Plenty of prominent artists have that same studio model, also including Ai Weiwei and, in a sort of satirical way-- Thierry Guetta, as depicted in the film Exit Through the Gift Shop. This "production line" type operation is a bit different thought.

You're right, but I mention those two because I believe Warhol was the most famous early adopter, and Hirst is the most notorious, being the richest artist in the world.

Early adopter of something that dates back to at least the Middle Ages? Earlier, really, if you consider that a lot of Roman statuary was mass-produced. And I'm probably missing out on non-Western-culture examples.

I may be wrong but my understanding was that the Renaissance painters would use their assistants/apprentices to perform all the more tedious and time consuming tasks, which in those days including making the paint itself. And in terms of the actual painting, several stages of underpainting and the less "interesting" passages of the painting (e.g. backgrounds, clothing) would be done by assistants, leaving the artist to work on the focal points of the painting (e.g. faces).

This is very different to getting assistants to create "original" dot paintings, working to a formula, where the artist's hand only intervenes to sign the work.

And I'm not saying it wrong, or not art, just that it is fundamentally different to the old tradition of studio assistants.

I think Thomas Kinkade's operation was one of the most lucrative.

Kostabi too: http://juddtully.net/articles/painting-by-the-numberspaintin...

He also had a sign in his factory that read "minimum wage is a cage". Seems fitting based on this site.

A valid artistic order would expel Hirst immediately. His continued celebrity is a massive indictment of the arts economy.

I suspect even Hirst agrees. For the love of God strikes me as a blatant challenge to the curatoria...in fact I think it's the only interesting work he's put out in the last few years.

Have you seen the Hennessy Youngman bit about Hirst? It's fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y_8DWg5W0w

Oh dear :-)

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