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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

This is as old as history of art. To me art is "anything you don't have to do". People start doing art when their basic needs are met and then start doing things they don't have to do to survive.

Looking in history you can see a lot of rich kid artists doing great art. For instance Gustav Klimt was extremely wealthy. He literally painted with gold! His art is great but without his family's wealth nobody would discover his talent.

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> This is as old as history of art

That's not entirely correct.

Many artists were dirty poor when they started and stayed poor their whole life or died poor after wasting all their earnings.

Notable examples: Amedeo Modigliani and Antonio Ligabue

Hmmmm, according to Wikipedia: "Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule [...]" - did you mean someone else by any chance?

Klimt's student Egon Schiele came from a pretty modest background and fell victim to the Spanish Flu at the young age of 28, but many people would still recognize him as the superior artist (even if Klimt remains slightly more well known).

But as soon as you've bootstrapped a career in art, you get paid for it, and you don't need inherited wealth.

That's less than 1% of artists.

Most of them work in other professions for living.

The thing is, successfully doing that requires not only talent and hard work, but also luck. And even then the amount you get paid may not be enough to live on.

But you only need to be "ramen-profitable" ...

If you're willing to commit to a life eating ramen and not affording anything (including healthcare and retirement)...

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