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.