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Comment by amon22 | Hacker News Reader

That's kind of depressing

There seems to be a recurring sentiment in the comments that we're losing artists to tech, but you know what we lose even more artists to? Commercial art.

Earning a living as an artist is tough. Most won't get their work seen in a gallery, so they turn to commercial art or graphic design. Now they learn to create art for a client that fits a brief. They do this every day for years until they lose the ability to make art for themselves. I know this happens, because it happened to me.

Learning to code was the best career decision I ever made. I now make significantly more money than I did before, which enables me to fund my own art projects on the side. I'm learning to get back in touch with why I wanted to make art in the first place. Like it or not, we all need to earn a living. In my opinion, doing so in an art-adjacent field is not somehow morally better than doing so in tech.

The difference between you and I is that we both fund our art habits via our day jobs in tech but I didn't make the change...I started this way from the get go intentionally so that I could make my art career the way I wanted (a compulsion, not an occupation).

You don't only "lose" artists to commercial art. Many choose it intentionally, because it can be its own reward. Whether it's fine artists who do comics, storyboards and magazine illustration (e.g. Bill Sienkiewicz, Kent Williams, Geof Darrow) or classic illustrators like Syd Mead, Bob Peak, Fuchs Norman Rockwell and sleeve designers like Saul Bass, Hugh Syme or Storm Thorgerson on down to weird mutant hybrids like the Emigre font house or Vaughn Olivers' v23 or the Bill Smith Studio....the line between "artist" and "commercial artist" is a blurry one.

I've moonlit as a commissioned painter and illustrator (whose work often enough ends up licensed for commercial purposes, usually book cover or musician-packaging) and I find zero issue bouncing between the two spaces. I know that is not necessarily for everyone, but its also not a small slice of folks either.

I don't disagree with anything you've said. I'm not trying to argue that all commercial art corrupts artists. So many of the artists I look up to are commercial artists themselves. I'm more attacking the idea that an artist who learns to code is something to be sad about, because it will presumably sap them of their creative energy. My counterpoint is that an artist who has to turn their work into a commodity is at risk of losing their creativity as well.

I know that it's different but at least from my perspective my passion has always been code and building things. What I really want to do is work on my own projects but I need to make money too. My job isn't particularly interesting or engaging but I am thankful that I get to write code everyday for a living and at least do things that somewhat contribute to my projects outside of work.

I don't know I just feel like the categorization is a bit unfair that doing something you love in a commercial setting will strip you of your creativity. I think to some extent work as whole through pure exhaustion does that but that's why I'm glad that I get the measly reward of doing something adjacent to what I enjoy. I'm sure I'd feel differently if tech salaries were lower but if they were identical would you really prefer writing enterprise software all day over doing commercial art?

> you know what we lose even more artists to? Commercial art

I remember a commercial for Mucinex (cough medicine) where anthropomorphic boogers get their house wrecked by a tornado courtesy of Mucinex. Somewhere in the chaos, a painting of the Mona Lisa as an anthropomorphic booger goes by. I often wonder what was going through the artist's mind while they were crafting that little detail.

Agreed. Personally, it's depressing that everyone's getting into software, increasing my competition. Societally, it's depressing that people think art is a viable career unless they don't need to care about making money.

Starving artists have been around since time immemorial but it used to be less un-viable in the past.

Starving everybody has been around since time immemorial. It doesn't mean it's relevant to our modern era (or at least not relevant in the same way).

LOL, I graduated with a degree in graphic design and an emphasis in illustration, and even got a couple of jobs in the games industry.

I had to change into software because I couldn't get fulltime work anymore and needed the benefits (I'd been coding for fun since high school - started with Flash). It was all gig jobs. Plus I make substantially more coding because "I don't get the pleasure of having the dream job of making art for video games".

Societally, the problem is that neo-liberal capitalism assigns no market value to art, but is more than willing to pay huge sums for a pixelated bald monkey.

We seem to assign a quite large market value to art. Film, television, music and book publishing are all huge industries. Add to that all the artistic pursuits that are part of every business (graphic design, some types of marketing, etc) and we almost certainly spend more on art than we ever have in the past.

That's entertainment and media.

Why? Art simply doesn't pay, by and large; it is, if perhaps to variable extents, a recreational pursuit as opposed to a viable profession. So it's best when people who are good at art also have other skills that they can use to get an income and further their hobby.

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