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Comment by neontomo | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the art scene, and when it comes to submitting proposals for exhibitions and being in art/film festivals and such, competing against other people being picked is surprisingly easy when you realise that most people don't study the brief that tells you exactly what the organisations is looking for. make sure you nail everything in the brief and you're in the lead, even if your art is terrible. I feel this is similar in nature, but taken to its extreme.

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This means that to improve one's chances to gain publicly, one should adjust their art to the exact requirements of the publicity-producing organization, and not let artistic whims like "inspiration" ruin the day. Or, better yet, has to learn how to reorient the latter slightly to check every box when a checklist becomes available.

This requires a serious mastery of the art that allows to obtain exactly what's envisioned.

It also rubs many artists the wrong way, because they want to be led by the art, ideas, concepts, etc, and not by external riders. OTOH most great masters of the past worked under such conditions, with notable success. Michelangelo certainly had a rather detailed list of requirements for the Sistine Chapel paint job.

in my experience, your submission does not have to be a carbon copy of what you end up making. you can check the boxes to make them trust your artistic ability - then you can make it yours, within reason. the money controls the art outcome, until you're banksy. a lot of great artists are able to stylistically and thematically change their art on a whim, by studying the materials/style and putting conscious effort in. this is not rare. modern art does not require mastery by any means and some of the more successful artists actively avoid perfectionism.

Modern art may not require visible utter technical mastery, even though sometimes it's demonstrated, too. What I mean by mastery is the ability to produce such an oevre that checks all the right boxes, and does not check any wrong boxes. In this regard, being edgy and provocative is the right trait to demonstrate, while overstepping it and, say, showing something that can be seen as bigotry is not comme il faut. Navigating these boundaries efficiently is what I also mean by mastery.

I agree with what your saying but I believe this applies to everything in life.

From what you do at work or say to your friends to whether you break a writing rule or whether you jump a fence.

When you observe people in their element, you can tell apart the people who know know when to break rules and who haven’t figured it out.

Yep!

I mean, anyone's free to create whatever art they want on their own time and dime, and accept that it may or may not resonate with others and their pocketbooks. If you're applying for a specific thing for someone to give you money and they've said what they're looking for...yeah, you should probably conform to that.

It depends on whether you're doing art for the artistic expression or to make a living. If it's the latter, you'll need to do what is asked or what is worth money instead of what you want. This applies to every creative endeavour, or hell, most of anything that earns you money. I don't want to sit here writing user stories that should ideally be fixed today, but it earns me money and I can do it so I guess.

I'm not in a grant field, but this comment reminded me of this video from attoparsec about public art grants from a few years ago that really resonated. My mom spent the last ~15 years of her career in a field that involved grant writing for public health projects, and many of the strategies were similar.

Video: https://youtu.be/cK4K8aj7X1s?si=xAQH54SfC8yUE_ll

The same is true for scientific grant applications.

Except the reviewers don't usually read it either

A thousand times this. M******g reviewers who fail to comprehend the instructions for evaluating a proposal is a perpetual pain in the neck.

I'm surprisingly annoyed that I cannot guess what word you you are censoring, and AI wasn't helping much, mind spoiling it for me?

Also, I don't think you have to censor words here in general.

What profanity that starts with M, ends with G and references sex comes to mind?

We’re an adhocracy that uses votes, and profanity doesn’t win votes…simple math…

something something with mothers

Looks like "motherfucking" to me, just missing a couple asterisks.

I failed to account for HN parsing asterisks to make text italic, eating up the leading and trailing one I believe.

As a person who is also in the art scene, this is reasonable and inspiring.

i have a friend who is great at this, so i picked her brain a bit. she does this method and i see her booking show after show without a social media presence. she does 90% studying the brief, 8 percent presenting her submission in a structured way (think: explain the idea, what lead up to it, how it will benefit the show, who she is, and even visualises how it will look by photoshopping her art into their space) and 2% submitting beautiful work.

Everybody other than the artists love that "presenting her submission" part.

Better than the piece. Better than the essay about the piece. They want the summation of the essay of the piece. Preferably with an associated pic of a cute art goth pixie.

Ah art.

Is goth still in?

Ya but they call it something different. I forget what. Maybe "death cultists".

No they don't, they call them mommy instead.

Goth is always in. It just floats in and out of the consciousness of non-goths over time.

Basically what we are all doing here on HN. We are social creatures by nature and the commentary and commentators are often more entertaining than the subject.

My dad is an accomplished artist but never wanted to play the art scene and mostly spent his career as a professor. He once produced an entire storage shed of metal sculpture than he later recycled for lack of anything better to do with them. I could only fit two in my house.

Even engineering contests are like this. I remember back in college there was a sustainable dog house competition with a very clearly defined rubric. My partner and I min/maxed the hell out of it and won first prize and $1,000, while everyone else built beautiful dog houses that ultimately missed the point.

what was the rubric they missed?

There was a lot of emphasis put on insulation values, thermal mass, and temperature differential. Half of the dog houses were like 20 pounds and open to the air on all sides. We put a 150 lb garden on top of ours to act as a heat sink and then insulated all the walls of the dog house. We were able to keep 10 degrees below ambient after 3 hours out in the sun.

The rubric also put a ton of points on the technical report which seemed like an after thought for most people but at the end of the day it was an engineering competition so the whole point was the technical portion and the dog house display itself was kind of just the fun bit. We did really well just because we bothered to do all the requested calculations on life cycle cost analysis, heat losses, carbon balance, etc.

Our final product looked like a tank, but it won by a long shot.

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