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Valuable to others, or only you?

sivers.org

66 pointsraheemm36 comments

Almost all great works of art were produced for the enjoyment of the artist's patrons, be it music, visual art or theatre. For most of western history, it was obvious that an artist's main concern was first and foremost to please his patrons.

I think it says something rather worrying about modernity that at some point we rejected the notion that "he who pays the piper calls the tune". From Shakespeare to The Beatles, there is a tremendous history of great works being produced by avowedly populist artists.

Personally, I think it's a symptom of our cultural narcissism. When we strip away the rhetoric of art, it becomes obvious that "ignoring what other people think and just making your own art" is vain and arrogant.

Here, here. I would love to have this exact discussion with many of my peers. Somewhere along the way much of my generation (i'm 30) has become strangely convinced that the world will fall over with gratitude and shower them with money simply because they happen to be "passionate" about what they're doing. It's insanely self centered, and more to the point, it ain't so. To make money you need to have something of value - to the person with the money.

I disagree with your assertion that most art was produced with the enjoyment of the patron as the primary motive. It could easily have been a byproduct or a necessary evil. Or, it could be that patrons were more deferential to the artists of the day.

Plenty of great artists have been unpopular or unknown in their day.

Also, plenty of the popular artists were doing much more than letting the piper call the tune. Shakespeare and the Beatles pushed boundaries, they didn't take requests.

If there's a cultural narcissism, perhaps it is now that patrons demand immediate accessibility and relevance. It seems far more vain and arrogant to condemn an artist because they didn't ask for your opinion first.

Besides, I think much of that is a straw man. Most artists do care what other people think; they just don't care about what everybody thinks.

The patron used to say "You there, I hear you are a painter! I shall pay you a handsome sum if you will paint my lovely wife." And Leonardo would go off on his own practicing, maybe have the wife sit for some modelling sessions, come back with the Mona Lisa, money changed hands, all was good.

Somewhere along the way the piper-payers, not content with being the financial enablers of greatness, decided that they had to get involved somehow. So now we have the present situation where children's cartoons are created by TV and toy company execs who can't draw; and Orson Welles is micromanaged in his delivery of voice-over copy about frozen peas. And working for hire lost its cachet.

There's something rather worrying when you deem "a monkey for hire" to be more noble/proper than an artist shopping his art to prospective buyers. Whose tune have you called lately? Which artist did you commission to create your portrait?

Patronage is inherently a limited, elitist, classist system. I don't exactly approve the load of crappy art we see these days, but to go back to begging for scraps from power elites is a thousand times worse.

How is to express yourself vain?

I suppose keeping a diary, which in its own way is a literary form, is vain?

It's vain when you think that your deepest feelings are so interesting that people would want to hear about them them. It's vain when you're more concerned with what you have to say than whether people will enjoy hearing it.

I get genuinely angry when I go to a gig or a show where it's obvious that the performers are self-absorbed and have no interest in the audience. The audience have paid to come into town, they've paid for their tickets, they are paying for drinks at the bar, the least the band can do is try to entertain them. When bands play indulgent solos or play a bad song that the drummer has written, they're insulting their audience by saying that their ego as a band is more important than the enjoyment of the fans.

If you keep a diary or paint purely for your own pleasure then that's fine, the problem comes when you expect people to care about your art. We tell aspiring writers and musicians and artists that they should 'be true to their art', but I think that's dead wrong - I think your duty is to be true to your audience.

There's an interesting exception in comedy. A bad comic can't hide - if he's not funny, it's obvious to everyone. Today, comedy is really the only artform where it's acceptable for an audience to boo off a performer, but historically it was commonplace in all performing arts. I think we as a culture should be prepared to say "no, you haven't worked hard enough on your performance, go home until you're good enough to entertain". It happens every night at comedy clubs, but rarely anywhere else.

I think that mistake is a symptom of the prizes-for-all narcissism that says everyone's opinion matters no matter how ill-informed or poorly thought out, that every crude doodle is a work of art if the doodler really meant it. A fundamental trait of narcissism is magical thinking, the belief that wishing something makes it so. The art world has in many respects come to define art as whatever the artist decides is art.

"I think that mistake is a symptom of the prizes-for-all narcissism that says ... every crude doodle is a work of art if the doodler really meant it."

It is. Art is a process as well as a result. Whether the result is good art, mediocre art, or bad art is the real question here, and some art is undeniably terrible.

painting by numbers (art by demographic statistics): http://www.amazon.com/Painting-Numbers-Komar-Melamids-Scient...

When I was 10, The Flintstones had an episode about this. Fred and Barney gathered statistics about what people wanted in a song, and then composed it. They catered to all subjects, and a punchline was that one of them was "mothers-in-law". The song was terrible; the main message seemed to be that such art lacks integrity (not in an ethical sense, but in a sense of fitting together, being whole, being one thing). Of course, such lack isn't necessary (eg. the Monkees had some great songs), but it is much harder than speaking out of a deeper truth. Perhaps it's like the flow of writing off the top of your head vs. over-editing and getting a patchwork of concepts and mismatched conjugations.

I've always liked the idea of a work being both popular and critically acclaimed (who doesn't?). I do think there's a thrill in doing something that is very cool to yourself; but there is also a thrill in doing something that is truly valuable to people. Both can be aspects of the heroic journey, of serving something greater than oneself: serving an idea, or serving a community.

But I think this may be a little different for art (which Sivers is talking about) and software (which I'm (mainly) talking about).

I remember hearing on the radio some time back they were interviewing Brian Mcfadden and he was talking about the inspiration for he's latest album. Basically he had gone and sought out exactly what the popular trends in music young people were listening to at the moment and created an album to match those trends.

It seems like sales and popularity wise a smart thing to do but I was quiet thrown by an artist saying that there work wasn't a personal expression but rather designed for maximum return, it seems counter to most of what you heard with artists speaking of there music.

Granted I wouldn't personally be listening to his music either way.

I have a working hypothesis that all of the best (or, at least, most famous) artists in history actually worked this way: they first became a "machine" with well-honed skills, and preferences slowly beaten into shape over decades of experience, into which high concepts could be fed and art would emerge—and then fed in the best of their current culture at the time. Shakespeare, for example, or Bach.

If you take an average journeyman artist and try to "plug and chug" culture, you get, well, pop. But if you take a master, you get classics. (And I do mean to imply the converse: if you give a master an input that isn't popular culture, the result likely won't be a classic—in the way that Star Wars or Dark Side of the Moon is classic. Instead, people will refer to it as a "masterpiece", like Lolita or, lately, Inception.)

The main difference between the two types, is that masterpieces just sit there and accrue attention, while classics actually melt back into the culture that spawned them, inviting parody and pastiche to such a point that it could be said they have invented a genre (ahem, Lord of the Rings.) It is the latter that will "stick" to culture hundreds of years hence, while the former will be relegated to scholars and textbooks.

Bach didn't write pop music that was the product of the current culture. He wrote in a style that was considered archaic and byzantine; a dead style even in his time. Baroque music was dead and classical music was on the rise. He was always well respected, but never popular in his lifetime (or generations after).

I also object to your claim that Lord of the Rings invented its genre. I don't know who considers Inception a masterpiece in the same way Lolita is. And so on. I'd complain more about all the wrong things you wrote, but I wonder if there's a point. It just bothers me when people try to get all intellectual about things of which they clearly have no knowledge.

Baroque vs. classical music: That is at best a very simplistic view of the situation: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music#Transition_to_the... . Also, note that counterpoint remained alive and well, though it certainly did not have the importance it had in the Baroque period, through the Romanticism and the 20th century. The chorale (second movement) from Vierne's second symphony, Shostakovich's cycle of 24 preludes and fugues, and the canon section from the first section of his 7th symphony come to mind.

Furthermore, my impression (though I cannot find a citation to back this up) was that many if not most of Bach's compositions were produced by taking elements of popular culture and trying to produce from them something people would find meaningful on the next Sunday. Consider the Passion Chorale, which Bach used in (among other things) the Christmas Cantata and the St. Matthew Passion. The tune was originally composed 50 or 100 years earlier by Hans Leo Hassler for a song whose title was something like "my heart is beguiled by a pretty maid"; the most common words ("O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden") are from a German translation by Paul Gerhardt of a mediaeval Latin hymn.

All of this is not to deny or even to downplay Bach's genius. He simply, as derefr says, took popular inputs and did amazing, wonderful things.

To refer to chorale melodies as "popular music" is really a stretch. For instance, Wikipedia tells us that "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" was in use as a chorale by 1656. You'd be really stretching to call this and other chorales a "popular input". I've never read or heard anything to indicate that church melodies were significantly popular in the 1700s.

Popular music was stuff like song, opera, maybe some easy instrumental stuff (though I can't remember when music publishing took off). Bach wrote few songs, no opera, and his instrumental output was very difficult and went largely unpublished.

Also, I don't know what the 'Christmas Cantata' is. Google wasn't any help in clarifying it. Bach wrote about two billion settings of that chorale, so that's not much help.

>It just bothers me when people try to get all intellectual about things of which they clearly have no knowledge.

Wow, that's rather harsh. While his examples might not have been the best representation of his point, he did bring up an interesting idea.

your last sentence may come off as rude

Inception isn't a classic. Or a masterpiece. It's a slapdash confluence of popular trends within the community of filmmakers:

* Dealing with unreality, with hinted-at promise of imagining fantastical worlds, but really providing an excuse for more car chases, explosions, and gunfire than is plausible within our current legal framework (The Matrix)

* Multiple levels of unreality and ambiguous ending (Vanilla Sky)

* Leonardo DiCaprio isn't sure what's real anymore, and is haunted by visions of his crazy dead wife (Shutter Island)

* Statement about filmmaking itself (perhaps every auteur film in the past ten years)

Yeah, it's a tough line to walk between being a pure artist and a pure mercenary. The most rewarding use of one's time is to find a balance, like Sivers suggests.

I think many artists (perhaps to their financial detriment) value the process/journey as much as the destination. I know that personally, the motivation I have to finish a project peters out when I've solved the fun technical challenges.

I don't know this artist, but his name seems strangely appropriate for his approach to art.

Is it any different from a programmer that creates a product to fill a niche?

It's probably different for different kinds of art, but one of the biggest things I like about art/music/literature/etc. is that I'm getting someone else's reaction to things, vision of how things are, opinions on things should be, etc. So it starts feeling fake and misleading if I realize it's not actually their reactions or vision at all, but was, in the extreme case, something carefully concocted out of market research and focus-group testing. Even if I was the focus group, so it was perfectly targeted, I don't actually want art/music that extracts my own vision/ideas/etc. and reflects them back at me! I want to see someone else's take on things.

I feel it's fairly hard to get particularly innovative and deep stuff that way as well. The optimization-based approach to making art can only really optimize surface-level, but rarely gets you a totally new vision, which needs more of a strong creator's imagination behind it. For example, supermarket-romance book publishers using focus groups and metrics could never have invented cyberpunk.

It's ironic that you use Mozart as an example since he A) died poor and alone and B) would probably be long forgotten by now if he'd gone out of his way to create music that created value for others.

A) Mozart died poor and alone because he was an alcoholic and was horrible with money. His music was tremendously popular during his time.

B) Mozart was raised as a professional musician from an early age by his musician father, performing to royalty as a child prodigy. His JOB was court musician. Given his upbringing and employment, how could he NOT care about what others thought about his music? How could he NOT cater to their tastes?

> he was an alcoholic

[citation needed]

Upon searching Wikipedia and not finding it, I realized the actual source is the movie Amadeus...

Just as good, right?

Just as good, right?

Probably not:

Mozart's drinking runs as a sub-theme throughout the plot in Amadeus. But in reality, it seems that he rarely drank to excess, though in his last year or two his drinking did appear to have increased. During the summer of 1791 when Constanze was in Baden, "he used to drink champagne with Schikaneder all morning, and punch all night." But this report stems from Ignaz Ernst Ferdinand Karl Arnold, who was without firsthand knowledge. While alcoholic writers are legion, the condition seems rare among composers; it is possible that great music was composed under the influence, but not with such consistency or productivity.

http://www.mozartproject.org/essays/brown.html

Not trying to bust you. Just trying to discern the truth and a quick google turns up no real agreement with the movie version. As for other remarks here about Mozart being poor, that may not be accurate either:

Mozart never went out of style, he never was broke, fallen out of favor, etc., and the bit about being buried in a Pauper's grave? Well, everyone who was not royalty at that time was buried in mass graves. If you were notable, but not royalty, you got a plaque on the wall of the cemetery, which he did.

The fact is, Mozart was pretty well off for most of his adult life, compared to the average Venetian. He had a billiards table, an apartment with several rooms, and even his own carriage, which was very unusual for even the middle class. When he died, an audit was performed for death taxes, and it was done by a fellow Mason, who listed the value of his stuff at WAAAAYYYY lower than it actually was worth - as a favor to his widow.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080512155619AA...

When I'm looking for things others have created, I actually tend to use the opposite of this question. Was it created by someone who themselves finds it useful/interesting/etc., or did they just make something that they thought would be useful/interesting to others, but don't themselves really care about? I tend to avoid the second category if possible.

This reminds me of 2 pieces of advice I received from 2 early mentors, both 3 words, and diametrically opposed.

1. "Scratch an itch."

2. "Find a customer."

#1 comes naturally to a hacker. I'm always building things for myself. Then I think, "If I need it, someone else probably does, too."

#2 does not come naturally at all. I have to work at it. Frankly, I'd rather build stuff than talk to people (although that has changed quite a bit over the years).

FWIW, I have found very little success with #1 (one big exception: a program generator I wrote for myself was very well received by others).

#2 has worked beautifully. Every time I have ever found and satisfied a first customer, the second, third, fourth, etc. were much easier to find and satisfy because they needed the same thing. What great advice. I wish I had listened much earlier.

How do you do #2? Do you have a solution in mind and then look for customers or is it a matter of asking people what their problems are or a bit of both? Do you do cold calls?

How do I find customers? I just talk to people. All the time. I allow my inquisitive nature to take over. But most importantly, I really care. A mentor of mine once told me that lots of people need what we provide, so it's our responsibility to find them and see what we can do to help.

If I'm in someone's business (even as a retail customer), I often ask to watch as they enter data into their customer facing system. This invariably leads to some discussion and who knows what else. I attend events and network regularly, even if it's just staying in touch with acquaintances and asking what others are up to. Email works really well for this.

I don't have a solution in mind because I want to listen to the other's problems first. If something I have written (generally small business or e-commerce) sounds close to what can help them, I may go down that path. Anything else, I pass, but gladly provide a referral to someone who can help, if I know of any.

I don't cold call in the pure sense. That's just not my nature. If I ever got good at that, then I wouldn't need to be a programmer, I'd just sell someone else's product.

I found an old semi-related post of mine that may also be helpful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182400

Steven Blank and Eric Ries talk about a "customer development process" - you might want to look that up. I am going through it myself these days and it feels like they are talking directly to me.

I wonder if the effectiveness of #1s is based on the person's interests and what itches they are scratching. Since for many devs their first inclination is to scratch their development itches... however in a fair few cases you are putting yourself in a market where your own audience might be able to do as well/outdo you, making things tougher.

When you're writing tools for less technical groups, and taking the effort to make them highly usable by those who are less technically savvy the odds of running into similar problems are lower.

I think pg had a good essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

basically, it says that it's better to try to create something that you want, because when you're young you will have a very difficult time understanding what someone else wants. Also, you are more likely to be motivated if you are creating something for yourself. Creating something for someone else is too much like work (without the salary)

Push to new shocking extremes to give people something to discuss afterwards.

This is the pattern I call "pickling the shark", after a piece of artwork carefully calculated to do precisely that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physical_Impossibility_of_D...

I don't mean to be picky, but could someone correct the title before my OCD brain explodes?

Done

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