Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?

One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is Dale Chihuly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly), the renown glass sculptor.

Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hired others to do the work."

It's an interesting thought experiment about what art actually IS: is art the idea behind the piece? Is it the skill that the individual has in physically bringing the piece to life? If the person with the vision doesn't physically produce the outcome, is it still their art?

It's pretty easy to sit back and say "No, of course not, if you only have the vision and don't do any of the work, then you don't get all of the credit!" And yet, think about how this translates over to the technology world. Whose name is associated with the iPhone? Steve Jobs. Did he, alone, design all aspects of the device? Perhaps. Did he code every chip, bevel every edge, sketch every wireframe? No. Did it come to fruition in a vacuum? Of course not, and yet very few of us can name any of the other individuals who collaborated with Jobs. Does Steve Jobs deserve credit for the invention? Of course, and he signed off on every design decision and charted the course for the device to come into existence. However, he was not an independent actor, but a spearheading collaborator with a very large team coming together to work on one project. And yet, Steve Jobs is the name we know.

So in that vein, is Dale Chihuly an artist? If he only designs the pieces (and from what I've seen, "designing" consists of vaguely sketching out colored shapes on large pieces of paper and then overseeing all of the glassblowers who make the various parts of his sculptures) but he never physically produces ANY of the sculptures attributed to his name, does he deserve all of the credit? If he oversees the whole process, start to finish, and has final say on every single aspect of the sculpture, should he be lauded for his vision even though it was not his effort that brought that vision to life?

Prominent artists having an array of assistants and understudies who do most of the detailing, while they themselves focus on more important matters like choice of subject, medium, technique and composition seems to have been the practice in the times of the Florentine and Roman masters, as I read from "Agony and Ecstacy".

Even architects do something similar, did Zada Hadid design every cornice and every pillar? I guess its the same with law firms also.

As an artist, this article makes me so upset.

The people doing the actual work should be getting credit.

Of course the people coming up with the ideas should be getting credit too.

When one person comes up with the idea and another with product, it's a collaborative work and credit should be shared.

Artists who try to pass off a work they merely collaborated on as exclusively their own are despicable.

A few friends have worked as technicians for a very well known British artist.

As far as I can see he pretty much hires every art graduate within a reasonable radius of his art factory. They do the majority of the production work, to his specifications. Eventually they get bored and leave to do their own stuff.

Another guy I know is a sort of 'special projects' consultant for artists, figuring out particular logistical or engineering challenges. It sounds really fun.

Sounds a lot like academia really and the open secret in many fields that the graduate "coauthors" were really the ones who did the work and the "main author" was the do nothing but compensated and credited more professor who hypocritically starts off every course stating plagiarism will not be tolerated.

The lack of transparency is what makes both of them bad. It would be one thing if an established member vouched for someone new as a supervisor to be clear they followed existing standards of experimentation and research or explicitly admitted they went from a 1/20th scale model to a granite and steel statue with modifications because the original was structurally unsound with different materials.

Pretty what should have been expected after we alienated skill from art.

This seems like one of those severts revealed to stories where it is only a "secret" to people who don't think about the topic, aren't paying attention, and for whom it doesn't matter...

I'm by no means an art expert, but I'm surprised that people would be surprised.

The local TV show that covers artists always shows their assistants and such working with them and outright producing the art.

When I've gone on visits to artists studios often the assistants are there, they are all upfront about what they do, and / or the artist talks about who else they work with (send the concept to others to produce) to make larger size and quantity pieces depending on the project.

I have never felt there was any attempt to hide any of it...

>'I can't believe they're not making that stuff, you're making it, so you're the artist, not them'. I think that's what the general population thinks.”

Yes, that's sure as hell what I thought. I mean, the whole point of being an artist is you create the work.

It's a lot less talent to tell someone what to do.

This article left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Art apprenticeship has existed since Caravaggio's time and beyond. But one relatively modern phenom is that you don't see artists assistants emerging after their period of indenture as stars themselves. People tend to get plucked for glory right out of school. Or they themselves hustle and blow up via Instagram. But you'll meet plenty of technicians in NYC at least who have been working in that role for 10+ years. Without emerging with a name or career of their own.

Reposting an old comment. The art world obeys supply and demand - where demand has no relation to the real world. Damien Hirst is a marketing genius. He needs a factory to build his art, much like Porsche.

If you are more curious about the contemporary art world market and why $29M is not that expensive[1], I recommend "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". In general, brand (in this case Christie's and Sotheby's) ranks supreme above all else. Once you are branded, you can pretty much sell anything as expensive art. Also, an interesting factoid - when we hear of Far East/Middle East buyers bidding tens of millions (or more) for a painting, we naturally tend to think - who buys that without seeing it - but as the book points out - the painting has most likely gone to see the buyer already (e.g. Dubai/Hong Kong pre-auction private tour).

Excerpts from the book:

"Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world -- everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such as Jasper Johns' 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it (currently Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem to want to acquire is what economists call positional good; things that prove to the rest of the world that they really are rich."

Jasper Johns' White Flag

http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-this-...

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329

Estimates on the artist economy: "40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC)

For London and NYC each: 75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income)

300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income)

5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

https://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-Contemporar...

[1] "If a great apartment costs $30 million, than a Rothko [big deal famous contemporary artist] that hangs in the featured spot in the living room can also be worth $30 million - as much as the value of the apartment. But no one could envision a $72.8 million apartment to use for comparison..."

Several years ago, the NY Times had an article by a fellow hired to work for Jeff Koons, who apparently designs but does not produce "his" work, something well known to those who care. The gig ended in failure, when the piece he was working on toppled. Koons apparently held no grudge.

Anyway, you could look it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/i-was-jeff-koons...

What seems missing here and in the article is the way in which an Artist’s physical interaction with media affect their ideas - it’s a feedback loop.

I think an Artist with huge experience of certain materials and processes can readily outsource work but I think an artist working solely in the idea sphere misses an opportunity for development.

I often think of David Lynch trying and failing to do the Elephant Man makeup himself and then yielding to a specialist - he must have learned and thought a lot about what he wanted doing that.

The really interesting in this is not the question of authorship (whoever is paying gets the credit; whomever is getting paid can maybe get gracious acknowledgement), itś the concept/process duality. I.e.

1) Whether things are fully defined by concepts (and therefore symbolic representation) or whether there's something to objects that's fundamentally process-oriented; (this comes closer do Hubert Dreyfus' critique of AI)

2) Whether concepts themselves can be conceived as products of pure ideation, or whether there is the "concept-making process" of which concept-makers are technicians (this comes perhaps as a critique of pure conceptual art; for one, every pure mathematician knows you learn the stuff by doing and acquiring instincts), and, conversely

3) Whether meaningful things can be produced as pure process, fabrication, algorithm; or whether there's a necessary conceptual aspect to processes; whether an artisan carpenter or decades-experienced plumber have a concept built into their muscle memory and analytic instincts. (This comes close to programming: why, after so much process-development, is programming still so much a creators thing?)

This is awful, of course, but nothing new. Plenty of painters sold their students’ work under their own names. Rembrandt is an example: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/arts/design/06rembrandt.h...

In my opinion, what matters is intent when it comes to wether something can be considered art or design, not skill. Art is self centered, to please your own aesthetic sense, design is centered around preferences of other people. If you e.g. paint to impress others, you're not making art, but design your own reputation as an "artist".

There used to be cartoons called "The Artist", with a little guy in an artists's smock. One was titled "Each print was produced under the personal direction and control of the artist." The artist is shown, hands on hips, watching an enormous printing press stamping out prints. That's art.

(I once visited a place in Silicon Valley which did just that. I was having boxes made for boxed software, and went to the printing plant. They had a huge multicolor press, about a hundred feet long. This could print not just four colors, but about ten. It could be loaded with inks of different specularity, so you could get shiny gold ink effects and such. The press was busily printing collectible art prints, good ones that looked like paintings. About two per second. The plant mostly did software boxes, but on slow days, they cranked out art.)

I'm a musician, and a lot of these ideas are familiar. But I wonder if the music scene is a little bit more mature or realistic (searching for a word here) about it. A work can go through a lot of different hands before it reaches an audience. People are fully aware of this. Yes, a few people get screwed, but others make an honest living as "technicians." It's been a reasonable side income for me. And except at the superstar level, the technicians might actually be doing better than the artists, especially if they can diversify their income sources a bit.

Even the instrument that I play... it bears the name of a master, but there's no secret about the fact that it was produced in a workshop, as the fiddles "made" by Stradivarius probably were.

to quote Modest Mouse

"All them eager actors / gladly taking credit / For the lines created / by the people tucked away from sight"

It applies to companies as well.

I believe that art comes from ideas, and sometimes you do need a helping hand to help them come out. Credit should still be given accordingly.

Example: Grab an album by Steve Vai (you should check him out if you don't know his music, btw)... somewhere in the album booklet you're gonna see a mention of the band members that helped him perform the music that he wrote.

What we are seeing here imho is the mixed case between hip hop (where every collab and participation is featured, to oblivion) and ghost writing in songwriting and fiction (where no one ever appears or gets credit). It's a good thing some 'ghost artists' are coming out and revealing this stuff.

This has been going on for a long time. If I'm not mistaken when Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel he would outline the major forms but he had a lot of assistants to fill in the details. So he conceived the design, drew that design on the ceiling (and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff) but the entire work did not "come from the hand of the artist"

To my mind it's about the idea and conception of the work. And when the technician improves the design or idea then that's when it moves into being a collaboration.

This is basically the plot (in my opinion, anyway) of Exit Through the Gift Shop

This is interesting but nothing new. As an artist I find the process and the intimacy with it as the most valuable part, that's where I learn and grow most. And the physical connection gives me most pleasure. I wouldn't get much value out of barking out orders and specifications to other artist technicians. On the other hand artist technicians need to eat too and it's okay that they get some work. It's embarrassing that they get no credit though but we know that is a facet of the human nature, it happens in almost every field

Much of the discussion here revolves around whether or not the artist deserves credit for creating a work if it was fabricated by other people, which I think somewhat misses the point.

The issue, I think, lies in the lack of shared credit that's granted in the art world to people whose labor and skills are utilized to realize the work.

Across most of the arts, the work of many artisans, craftspeople, technicians and workers is poured into the realization of an artwork, and across most of the arts those people receive some sort of credit. The film industry is maybe the best example here. In "cinema" the director gets top billing, but ample credit also goes to the screenwriter, cinematographer, sound designer & so on.

"Fine art" is an exception to the rule and I think this has to do with a mythology built around the artist that began in the modern era, coinciding with the movement in European painting from frescoes embedded in architectural setting to oil on canvas and the advent of the art object as a commodity. During the modern era and up through modernism, it became much more common for artists (and painters in particular) to work alone in their studios etc. etc.

Today, the role and scale of art has shifted again, and more craftspeople are often involved in the production of a single artwork than they were in the 1700s through the 1950s, but the mythology and institutional frames available remain stuck on the model of the single creator. I think this is just one of the many contradictions between material realities of contemporary art and the narratives and markets built around them. Maybe (hopefully) we're beginning to call some of that into question.

As an artist who has worked for other artists in the role of fabricator, there is a funny feeling when an artist hasn't touched (much less, seen, in one case!) the artwork that you've built for them until it's displayed under their name. In these cases I've never felt personally slighted, but it's weird knowing that only a subset of people working in the art world - artists, fabricators, gallerists, etc. - understand how many peoples' work often goes into making a big ambitious show. I think film-style credits would be an appropriate acknowledgement and some artists are actually beginning to do this.

This is essentially a branding process. Arguably it's just as bad in the tech industry: did Elon Musk really make that rocket himself? Was Steve Jobs wholly responsible for the iPhone?

Modern art is simply the craft of creating financial instruments, the only reason it's imbued with all of the imagery of sophistication and insight is because the people who buy expensive financial instruments like to think of themselves as sophisticated and insightful.

There's no difference between collecting fine art and collecting stamps. A stamp may be pretty, but its purpose is to be scarce, difficult to copy, and to have a clear provenance from a known issuer.

I have done 2 of these projects for contemporary artists. I have never experienced so many broken promises in one short period before in my life. Disgusting people.

I remember learning some unexpected facts at a Rodin exhibit several years ago. For sculptures that will be cast in metal or similar materials there is a set number of castings, I think it was 5, that can be made from a single mold and all be considered original. These castings can be made at any time, even after the artists death. This means you can have a sculptor die and still have original works being produced for several years.

Simon is a friend and he's one of the chillest and professional guys I know. He makes furniture and whole shop/office/room set ups that are fantastic. A true master craftsman. If you're into interior design porn his instagram is worth a look https://www.instagram.com/simon_harlow/?hl=en

The value of art today (and since the rise of avant-gardism) is highly contingent on context, the positioning of an object/gesture/operation within x context.

This article is essentially addressing the classic 'art vs. craft' question. From the perspective of art history, the technician, here, is not understood as the artist. She is understood as a skilled laborer who will be properly remunerated upon completion of her work (regardless if the work sells).

The other individual is understood to be the artist because it is she who 1) had the initial will/reason to make the work, 2) conceived of the idea and the object-form that this idea would take, 3) will assume risk for the work even if it 'fails,' and it is through _her_ history of production (and not that of the technician's) that the work will be valued and possibly historicized.

The canonical reference for the 'art vs. craft' question is Duchamp, who in 1914 presented his "Bottle Rack" as his art (an industrially produced rack for drying bottles) and later his famed "Fountain" (an upside down porcelain urinal) deeming them "ready-mades."

A more recent example can be found in the work of Jeff Koons. See this conference from 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbnWJNUtEc "The Koons Effect: Fabrication: Between Technology and Craft"

This has a parallel to startups. You want to make a startup as a technical co-founder, but you are not the "idea man". Does the "idea man" get all the credit? Someone else conceptualizes the art and someone else, or many others, do all the work. Who gets the credit?

Artist here. An anecdotal example of what the article discusses: an acquaintance of mine works for arguably the most commercially successful sculptor/Contemporary Artist in the world. Get him drunk at a dinner party and he'll talk about his job, which consists of working to create new "forms", by which he means 3-dimensional shapes, entirely on his own. Once in a while his employer pops into the studio and says the equivalent of "that one", and then it gets enlarged, painted, and sold as the exclusive creation of his boss for millions of pounds. He'll gripe privately about what HN'ers would call "IP", but he's also got a stable job, definitely at the upper end of what technicians get paid, and at this point in his life it would be a huge risk to his family's welfare try to make it on his own as an 'Artist'.

The analogies to a CEO, coach, architect etc will fall down because in none of those jobs does she, at the end, singularly own the entire physical and intellectual property of the object created when collaboration is involved...and of course in many cases there isn't a physical 'object' but rather a performance, a set of instructions, etc. While that is the point of the article, I think it's worth highlighting because it changes how an artist behaves and works with their 'team', hidden or not. It's also representative of how unusual a field art is. Another example is simply what happens in the buying and selling of Contemporary Art...investment funds secretly colluding with galleries to prop up auction prices which they then use as new (inflated) baselines to sell work to their own clients, members of museum acquisition boards arranging for their institution to buy works of artists that they personally own, tax evasion on a massive scale, etc. Conflicts of interest that might put people in prison in other fields can sometimes be part of my normal business day.

I like reading HN discussions about art because there are always attempts to think through an issue from first principles, where those first principles are some commenter's personal definition of what art 'is'. Artists don't do that. Trying to argue about what art 'is', amongst artists, generally stops after your first year in art school because the most popular definitions of art are self-reflexive (Dickie's "Institutional Definition" is the classic one). This self-reflexivity of Art implies that the definition of an Artist is also circular...which I'd suggest makes any sort of 'standard model' of the accepted behaviour of Artists difficult to pin down. To put it another way: in my experience, Art tends to be anything on the spectrum between “What Happens” and "What Someone Will Pay For". How to codify that as a field is nebulous enough. Now imagine creating, much less enforcing, a set of ethical labour practices specific to this field. And again, instead of these circularities being immediately thrown out as they would be in many other disciplines, they are seen as a part of Art's unique character as a field itself.

I see a lot of "this is the same as my experience with x" where x is CEOs, Academic paper authors, musicians.

Is it time that we own up to the fact that nobody exists in a vacuum? Can we skip straight to the socialism part?

For as long as there have been artists, there have been apprentices. Sometimes those apprentices went on to become renowned masters, sometimes they languished in obscurity.