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Comment by salomonk_mur | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully there are 8 billion people on the planet, each with different art tastes, and hence a different definition of what is good art.

So all of your versions are ok and coexist. There is a market for your turd, for people-art and for you elite-driven art and for many others.

In other words... No, if you can't attract and audience, there is no funding. But there is an audience for many things.

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can't mix together funding and audience. 1 prince liking your thing and appointing you as a royal artist is different than 100k people liking your thing on twitter but never paying a cent to you for anything.

Yeah, I agree. But that does mean that the primary skill of a good artist is finding that audience... y'know, marketing. Is that what we want?

It is what we got. You will have a hard time as an artist if you don’t curate your personal brand. Even authors need a TikTok and your social media clout is something publishers will ask about before they sign you.

this may be an overly optimistic take, but I'd argue that much like with software (indeed, we can consider software to be art, especially if we look at video games), the really good stuff tends to need very little marketing because it resonates with very many people in a powerful way, and those people it resonates with tend to share it with others. For example - Doom. I don't think during those days the primary skill of id software was "marketing". They made a really good game, and it kinda sold itself.

Doom and the shareware model are interesting examples in this context, especially given that Doom is now open source.

The average video game studio makes two games and goes broke. Most video game makers are living on their savings hoping for that one hit. Meanwhile the AAA studios are busy being complete arseholes, ripping their customers off, mistreating their staff, and generally being examples of the worst kind of capitalist.

I don't disagree with you. But I do think that this is a really bad model for funding video games creation, and gives us the worst of both worlds: indie developers are struggling and don't create their best games because they can't afford to, while AAA developers rip us off with mtx and loot crates because they're not in it to make money not great games.

So I'd argue that we should try to avoid this for the art world ;) And if we can, find a better way of funding video game creation while we're at it.

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