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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I volunteer with a local arts organization. We have lots of artists (over 200) with in various stages in their careers.

Fewer and fewer make a living at it full time. They struggle to make a business out of this. I feel like the art world has a very weird “winner take all” mentality. I kind of wish it was more distributed. I appreciate new revenue models, but I have mixed feeling about this.

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Maybe you can help answer this question for me because I come at it from a very different place: why is it expected that you can make a living from art? I am not trying to disparage it, but it seems to me that most art, while having artistic value, carries little monetary value. When art was relatively rare, you might want to decorate your home or business with a specific piece. But today nothing is stopping most people from printing out photos they took or buying mass produced decorations in the form of paintings or photos from places like Target or IKEA. Moreover, most artists I’ve seen usually push the envelope in terms of form and factor. Some of the coolest art I’ve seen has been non-traditional: a 30’ birds nest made of 10,000 old T-shirts. A kettle made of soldered metal buttons. A huge outdoor concrete ring. These things are amazing, but as a consumer I would pay a small sum to see them once and never a large sum to take them home.

I also struggle a bit to understand the percentage of artists who make a living off art vs total numbers. I am a hobbyist photographer and have been hanging around photo subreddits a bunch. One thing I see is that every year more and more people pick up a camera and try to make art (street photography are landscapes are big it seems). But not many can make a living off it and those that do mostly do things like event, corporate, real estate, or wedding photography (so more service than creative). In other words when everyone is a photographer/artist, only a few will be able to make money, but in absolute numbers there still seems to be a steady demand for high quality art. I guess this is a bit like everyone can cook but only a few Michelin Star chefs exist and not every cook can expect to be a high profile chef.

Curious about your thoughts on this.

Art requires an investment by the artist of time and space and supplies. Many artist here rent art space, and it’s nice if they’re able to sell enough to keep it going, even if they’re not making a living at it.

And I think having “local” is also a useful perspective.

I stumbled upon the “gates” by Cristo in Central Park. I don’t know if it people I was with but all those gates around the park were inspiring. I’m not sure someone would be able to put that together as a part time hobby venture.

It’s kinda like philosophers, as a society I feel it useful to have people thinking about big picture things, but these people still need to eat. Its useful to have art. (All the electric boxes in this city are painted. Its a little thing but it make it nicer)[1] We don’t want only independently wealthy people with spare time participating.

That being said not everyone is going to be able to make a living at this (philosophy or art). In this area at least because of gentrification the days of people painting and selling and making enough are over. We also had the museum of bad art here, and I’ll agree not all art is fantastic and inspiring.

Everyone who wants to should make art. It’s fun and very satisfying. highly recommend.

I will say, I have bought a few pieces of original art (fairly affordable) and they bring me joy.

I can create my own art (and do) which I enjoy (Photography). I have no expectations of making money from this. I had the chance to buy an art/service and turned it down:

I was a wedding photography assistant last century (often I did a flash on a stick for double lighting). When my boss retired I was offered to buy the business from her. With a newly paid for engineering degree, and her always complaining about client demands, I decided against it.

[1]https://somervilleartscouncil.org/switchbox

> I feel like the art world has a very weird “winner take all” mentality.

I agree strongly with this. I'm lucky enough to have a good job in software and I enjoy it enough to keep me happy, but I've also had serious art hobbies in the past.

I spent many years studying photography but never felt like I got to the point where I could impact somebody's life with it. I occasionally took portraits that people liked, but most of my time was spent doing landscapes. Everyone is so oversaturated with photographs and because of the internet it's basically impossible as a hobbyist to make your work stand out.

I started studying music in Dec 2019, which happened to be kind serendipitous because I had something to work on at home in the pandemic (there are only so many ways you can arrange eggs or glasses on your window sill to practice still life photography).

It struck me that with music, the barrier to have an impact on someone is much lower than with photography. With photography the cost of reproduction is essentially so low that people who are interested in it can see hundreds or thousands of photos through instagram in a day, and there's not a strong concept of the "original" piece. With music, the live performance aspect of music is impossible to reproduce, so it's much more valuable to people, and even simple songs with simple melodies can have a strong effect (I made my grandmother cry by singing "Georgian Song" by Bulat Okudzhava over Zoom, I had never made anyone cry through art before).

Kind of off topic but this is something I've been thinking about a lot.

> Fewer and fewer make a living at it full time. They struggle to make a business out of this. I feel like the art world has a very weird “winner take all” mentality. I kind of wish it was more distributed. I appreciate new revenue models, but I have mixed feeling about this.

I think that's because most people get into art for themselves and not because there's a demand. That means that they have to both create their art and the demand, in a domain that is really competitive because lots of people want to live from their art.

I have a cousin who is a theatre actor (here in Mexico). He loved acting all his life and I remember fondly going to see him at some of his presentations. However, in the last 10 years, the demand for actors has dried up crazily. He has been trying to get into programming (10 years ago was Java, nowadays is webdev) and asks me about it every now and then.

I'm always happy to help him in any way I can regarding technology, but man I am always feel very bad that he is pushed out of his passion due to a lack of demand in that sort of things.

Are they supposed to live off of their art? Who says that ever happened in history, or that should it be the norm? Are we supposed to distribute all earnings in the arts by force? How do we measure who gets how much?

You need to realise that most artists never made a living with their art. If they did, they had a rich sponsor who simply liked their art.

If rich people don't do that anymore: Tough luck. Maybe the rich people are at fault, but maybe the artists are crap?

Don't even get me started with the state and 'Somebody ought to do something!'isms.

"Winner take all" is of course not limited to the arts.

I see it everywhere, unfortunately.

At the same time, I see people "getting by" by finding a niche. In the arts it might be the guy that does intricate stipple art with his Rapidograph of dragons and makes bank going around to Renaissance Faires in the Fall....

(Okay, well, makes a little cash anyway.)

Sort of non-sequitur: watching David Bull on YouTube — you know, the Canadian ukiyo-e artist living in Tokyo? His "big break" came when he decided to pursue a 10 year project to (re)create 100 masterpieces of Japanese wood-block carving.

Imagine deciding what you are going to do, artistically, for the next 10 years of your life/career? And then to have to turn out a new piece almost every month for that decade.

And yet.

He finally started to see a return from repeat buyers ... collectors. And the collectors only grew over the years (and the collectors would want his back-catalog as well).

I know it's, again, not something everyone can emulate, but beautiful David found a way to navigate the path out of starving-artistry. Subscriptions and collections were the key.

Plenty of people are making some amount of money with NFTs that's more grounded in reality. I'm one of them. My NFTs sell for a couple hundred bucks and it's wonderful. There are probably hundreds or thousands of artists like me. We are not "art world" artists or big name "NFT" artists, but just folks that found a sales channel for our creative output.

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