Ask HN: Is there, or could there be, a Y Combinator for art? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there, or could there be, a Y Combinator for art?

6 pointsjamesbritt11 comments

In a thread about a "fiction factory", kenjackson asked "Is this the Y-Combinator of books?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898585)

That particular instance doesn't seem to be, but it made me wonder if there could be a Y-Combinator for art (be it literature, painting, music, etc.) or if such a thing already exists.

Thoughts?

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It would work in the sense of causing good work to get done. It wouldn't necessarily make much money.

The real problem though is that it would be hard to find someone to run it. If you want to make a YC of x, it has to be run by a domain expert in x. That works for x = startup, because YC is close enough to a startup itself. But for most other values of x it wouldn't work so well. The best painters would rather spend their time painting.

Giving the artist money and maybe introducing them to people in the art world would be great, but what would the Y Combinator of art do in place of the start-up bootcamp for three months? What would artist bootcamp be?

I think it would be pretty difficult to come up with some kind of three month course to improve the quality of your art (that is as productive as what happens in the real YC), but you could teach artists how to market themselves, I guess. Lots of artists aren't good at that.

I think it would work for artists interested in working commercially, to help them get skills for whatever field they wanna go into, learning how to market themselves, and getting connections. For fine artists who just want to show their stuff in galleries and museums, I don't know how useful it would be, besides the money.

What were you imagining for the "YC of art"?

    What were you imagining for the "YC of art"?

I don't quite know :)

Seeing that comparison made me start wondering what that might be, something that perhaps wasn't revenue focused but operated towards some other metric, but for art. Perhaps finding, filtering, prepping artists, ... don't quite know.

And maybe there is a business model there, but I was more thinking along the lines of, "Y Combinator is to start-ups as [_______] is to art."

To some extent that's what some of the more independent-music-oriented record labels are: front the capital and sometimes the recording expertise to put out and promote records, along with providing mentorship and connections, for musicians the label's owners think look promising, in genres those owners care about and have strong connections in.

For example, you might call this a list of the "startups" that Kill Rock Stars has invested in: http://killrockstars.com/artists/moreartists.php. As with tech startups, the big wins are where a lot of the money comes from; e.g. Elliott Smith's records pay for a large proportion of KRS's operations.

Sorry, to post on a days old topic, but I found it! The Y Combinator of art is this: http://creative-capital.org/aboutus/mission

The only thing is that you need a few years working as a professional artist to qualify, but besides that it sounds like it fits the bill.

I think Kickstarter ( http://www.kickstarter.com/ ) provides the funding aspect, but I'm not sure about the mentorship aspect.

It's called deviantart.

In what ways is Deviantart like YC?

You wanted an Art community and it doesn't get any better than deviantart.com in terms of sharing work, discussing art and getting feedback. Artists can even sell their work and I'm sure a lot of deviants have gotten work simply because of their portfolio on deviantart.com.

"You wanted an Art community ..."

No, I was wondering if there was something like, or conceptually analogous, to Y Combinator [http://ycombinator.com/about.html], the start-up funding/mentoring/development thing, not HN|news.ycombinator.com

The equivalent in the art world is an agent.

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