How to make a living as an artist
essays.fnnch.com
essays.fnnch.com
Also, this remark is giving away a fairly limited view on art appreciation:
> While you can learn from failures, only sales strengthen the muscle because only they show that someone actually cares about what you are making
This is obviously not the case for art projects that target only a few people, or art practices that do not result in tangible objects. (Although there are some exceptions, such as Marina Abramovich, but those are very limited.)
Great for them, but this is not about all art. It just is impossible to live of most art forms. This type of art fits well with our economy, and therefore makes a living. That fit is more important than all the business advice put on top.
The article does point out exactly this problem, but glosses over the fact that most artists don't want to change to popular art. Only a few can, and most don't want to.
https://collapseboard.com/a-young-person%E2%80%99s-guide-to-... https://lawrenceenglish.bandcamp.com/album/a-young-persons-g...
I also saw an experimental short at TIFF's Wavelengths program in 2024 that he "scored": https://tiff.net/events/wavelengths-1-eye-and-ear-control
I don't think author hides the fact. It's plain as day that to make a living, you need to sell art which resonates with people. You can still find room to be creative within that constraint, but you can't ignore the audience.
Artists should quit the illusion that they can create whatever they please and expect the income to automatically follow.
I didn't understand GP's point at all because I think the author makes this exceedingly clear: if you want to paint only for you, and only stuff that appeals to you and a limited few, that's totally fine (and I think the author really emphasizes that's totally fine), just don't expect to make a living off of it.
I thought this article was excellent. In particular, I liked the emphasis that you really just have to produce lots and lots of art to find "image market fit", because it's nearly impossible to know what will resonate with people before you create it. There is just an undeniably huge amount of luck in finding something a lot of people like, so it's important to give yourself as many swings at bat as possible.
> Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy. Emails, events, meetings, accounting, and more. These are not only a drag but can actually strip the joy from the rest of your art practice.
You'll have to do things you do not enjoy if you want to treat it as a business, including changing your artistic vision if needed etc.
> Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you.
A pragmatic approach could be to work on commericially-proven styles for money and your own style just for yourself (and potentially others if you make a branding that's famous enough).
At the end, yeah, it's a job if you want to make a living with art. There will always be market forces and to extract value from that, you need to understand and conform with it. But that's only if you see yourself as a business and not purely as an "artist" which I think is what you're reffering to when you say "most artists don't want to change to popular art" etc.
Also I don't think it's true overall. Like you say the "person is making very popular art" and that's why they're successful but there's many like them who are also making popular art but are not successful at all. It's also the process they follow and how they approach their business that sets them apart. That part is valuable info/guidance for any artist that does want to be commercially succesful imo.
Indeed, it's not like Tolkien worked on the Silmarillion for four decades before LOTR was published because he was trying to sell it.
I'm sure many on this forum have secondary passions, be it music, visual art, writing, or anything else. Yet most of us realized we need to make money, and that those pursuits can be done at a fairly high level in our leisure time.
I think the people you hear expressing dislike is probably due to his popularity and how often you see the honey bears around SF. He's also a Stanford economics grad, and some people in SF really dislike the stereotypical Stanford alums who think they're superior beings.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQajHzw...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRpoQbV...
There's AI slop, and then there's human slop.
Now apparently it means having any standards or metrics of evaluation, period. Either you think everything is equal aesthetically, or you’re a snob.
Thankfully this kind of empty opinion isn’t convincing many people these days.
I just said having aesthetic opinions doesn’t make someone a snob.
>One of the biggest mistakes I see artists make is painting things that don't resonate with people. Once you have an aesthetic that works, the market rewards you for exploring adjacent aesthetic territory. You might not make a living right away — it took me over two years from when I painted that first Honey Bear until I took my art full time — but it is totally necessary if you are to make a living off your own art (as opposed to teaching or commercial art). Until then, if what you're doing isn't resonating, you just need to just paint something else. Experiment with different concepts and directions until you find something that works.
He doesn't spend a whole lot of time deliberating on the literature versus television question, but it's easy to see what he's chosen.
I read a quotation recently that said in essence, the work of creativity moves from creating something no one else has ever seen or thought of, towards creating new and different insight into something almost everyone already knows about.
Andy really knew what he was doing (from the classic interview): https://youtu.be/n49ucyyTB34
This is completely backwards. The Beatles put out songs that they didn't think were hits, and put out songs that they were conscious of being the antithesis of a hit. They wanted to freak people out from time to time. As many artists do.
Just check out Revolution 9. Pretty sure you can't get much out there than that when it comes to music of that era. And still very out there to this day.
Or for a more 'songy songs' that I'm pretty sure they didn't think at all in terms of hit material: Tomorrow Never Knows or Within You Without You. And there's dozens more.
And frankly, isn't all promotion artificial?
I am sure you believe in certain things, you have convictions of some kind, some ideals you espouse. How would you think any of those things could come true if you are like a head of cattle on a range, with no understanding of your state of existing solely for the benefit of the rancher, grazing not because you are cattle that likes grazing, but because the rancher likes you grazing for his own purposes?
Don't worry though, you are not the only one who is really rather aggressively and intentionally self-deluding and seemingly unable and unwilling to see reality, since the soma he is fed is so pleasant and comfortable and warm.
It was the RIAA that certified sales figures and awarded the Gold Record, Platinum, and Double Platinum prizes. There were various formats that records could be distributed in, but let's simplify to the "album" and the "single".
A single was typically one song on each side, A/B, and the A-side was considered desirable and marketable. Singles were purchased first by radio and dance DJs so they could be played individually on demand. There was a secondary retail market for singles, so consumers could purchase them as well.
The record album developed from a set of many 78 discs and coalesced into a single, Long-Play, 33.33 RPM record. Its capacity was about 6 songs per side, depending on their length.
There were various strategies for collecting songs into an album, such as a sampler of the artist's best, all their performances in a year's sessions, or even various artists. During the Beatles' fame, the "Concept Album" and "Album-Oriented Radio" (AOR) came into being.
So you could sell singles with one hit song, and this would propel the "B-side" into people's homes as well, so they may get curious, flip it over, and play the B-side, but B-sides were often considered lower quality, disposable, or less popular.
An album could sell great if it had one hit track. Recording companies would usually peel off the best tracks on an album to release as singles too, so that the radio play would promote the band and drive sales of the entire album. Many people who heard a hit song would be disappointed when they spent a lot of money on an album, only to find "filler" in-between, because the album format usually guaranteed a certain runtime or number of tracks.
When the Beatles produced "Sgt. Pepper" it was a foray into the "concept album" where all the tracks contributed to a cohesive idea or theme. This tended to enhance album sales over singles, because the single would be a peek into the larger "concept" and whet the public appetite for the whole thing.
When "Album-Oriented Rock" became popular, the DJs were freed from the constraints of playing "hit singles" in isolation and they were more encouraged to explore the unreleased tracks ("deep cuts") from albums, as well as tracks of longer duration that weren't appropriate for hit radio stations. In turn, AOR bands were under less pressure to release their "hit single" for every album and shielded from the phenomenon of "one-hit wonders" while instead their audience was, again, encouraged to invest in an entire album.
In the 1980s, a 45 RPM single may cost $1.50 or $2, while a full-length album was $8.99 to $12. The format switch to cassettes was sort of masterful, because for a while, the 2-track single format was abandoned, and consumers were kind of forced to get the entire album on cassette.
Yes I've ignored a lot of rough edges here, like the older 78s, and 8-track cassettes, and classical radio, but that was basically the landscape for pop artists, who needed hits but first and foremost, needed sales. The Beatles also capitalized on another enduring method of driving record sales: live performances and world tours. It wasn't called "The British Invasion" for nothing.
And that's also how Queen almost broke up in 1975. (Roger Taylor making just as much money from singles for writing "I'm in love with my car" that Freddie Mercury for writing "Bohemian Rhapsody".)
many artists do things often knowing they won’t make money from that piece. and some artists believe money should never drive why you create a piece of art, different reasons should be at the forefront, should be the driving force, some force other than widespread success.
the beatles were well known for making thing they did not water down for the masses, knowing it would likely not be a commercial success. and conversely they were also known for intentionally watering things down so the masses would take it. it’s one part of why they have stood the test of time.
How do you conclude that? Is it hard to believe that Paul would write a song, and then realize it wasn't good?
> some artists believe money should never drive why you create a piece of art
Yes, and I'm acquainted with a few of those. They are proud that their art is something nobody else likes. They criticize others for "selling out", meaning making art that others like enough to be willing to pay for it.
They're just trying to justify their lack of talent.
I'm not impressed.
BTW, the Beatles very much enjoyed their money and success.
I'm not sure that's a good measure of worth. Unless you think others would? What's the market value for your family?
It's the basis of the Law of Supply and Demand.
This is something I wish I could impress upon 23-year-old me. I had all the drive in the world to create, and made some things I knew would (to the right market) sell - and I was, in fact, proved right, a few times - but I felt nothing but embarrassment about the actual selling. It wasn't even that I feared rejection - quite the opposite! I was an actor; rejection is, like, 90% of the job - and I had no problem selling other things, or others' work, just my own. Saying "I've got something great, you should buy it" about my own stuff felt unbearably egoistic. To be honest, it still makes me cringe. I'm not completely sure where that comes from - maybe an upbringing in a religious culture that emphasized humility? Anyway, I certainly don't have a "hustle" mentality, and can't quite bear those who do. Nevertheless, I'd have got a lot further in that career if I could have let go of that particular inhibition.
Empasized humility or crushed any sense of self worth?
I’m somewhat of two minds of the whole thing. I don’t blame the guy for making an income, but yeah, the honey bears are kind of boring, and especially w/ this post he comes off as a bit of a sellout. Art is weird.
> “These bears have become synonymous with gentrification in San Francisco,” he told fnnch, “and the displacement of the artists that come from here.”
I have mixed feelings (i.e. I understand your boredom) of his honeybear art from a pure aesthetic pov. However, (as any modern viral influencer knows), any successful artist will invite haters. This article reinforces the notion that fnnch is very successful...
So I found this article great to explain those things, and also how it's not just "you", but it's "the part of you that people need to buy" to make it into an actual business the thing that it's important. I'll be sharing it a bunch, I'm so happy fnnch wrote this!
Hundreds (if not thousands) of honey bears were posted in windows around SF. It was one of those things that happens in SF every now and then, a mix of whimsy and hustle and unexpected joy. We couldn't take our kids to school, we couldn't take them to the park. Instead, we would drive them around town and have them point out all the honey bears they saw. "Honey bear! Another one!"
I wish stuff like that would happen again, it was an interesting time where people actually stayed home and explored their environments, their home and themselves a lot. Before that (or at the same time?) it was AR games like Pokemon Go. I'm out of touch with what's happening now, it just feels like people have reverted or gone into a new normal. Or maybe that's just me.
For example, how does he earn from the Honey Bear murals? does the city or building owner commission him for the murals? If so, does he do some kind of outreach or sales call to the building owners or is it the other way round?
Not an artist and nor am I in the art world, just curious how does business work in there
In the blog post he also mentioned doing commissions.
As for the public art, I don't think he was directly paid for the initial honey bear, I think it was just marketing - that is, its popularity boosted his following.
Lots of muralists document the art/business on youtube! Two I like: Kiptoe and SmoeNova
> Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you. Try not to entangle your ego with your art. If someone does not like your art, that does not mean they do not like you. If they think your art is bad, that does not mean they think you are bad.
The movie is partly about an apartment built in secret in a mall as an art project, and partly about the lead artist, Michael Townsend. Townsend is generally the opposite of Marsh in that he isn't interested in money, to the point of pretty much having none.
Getting back to the quote about ego: There is a scene in the movie where Michael is having a conversation with his wife about building the apartment, and his wife is emphasizing that she's trying to set up their new home. Michael clearly had his ego entangled with his art, to the point where it caused his marriage to fail.
Hard, hard disagree.
Art and art-adjacent fields (storytelling in print and film, music, videogame design, etc.) are working with intangibles. The best artists wield qualities such as technique, perspective, charisma, zeitgeist and so on.
They build their creations in ways that they can't truly explain, and the resulting "product" generates emotions in their audiences - pleasure, sorrow, joy, energy, nostalgia, melancholy - and bonds that are so strong that they can't help but be drawn to the works.
Another way of looking at this dynamic: No one needs to listen to a favorite song, or visit an art museum, read a book by a talented author, or replay a beloved game in the same way that they may purchase a light bulb or sign up for a SaaS subscription. Yet TFA is treating art as merely another type of manufactured product.
Businesses have tried to harness art for millennia. Sometimes the businesses succeed. But where they often fail is assuming that art is a fungible commodity that can be created through an algorithm or assembly line, with the creative flame locked down and bent completely to the will of a business executive or technical product manager.
Such efforts from the likes of game studios or a record company or AI are derivative by nature and rarely inspiring. The exceptions are those built by creators whose intangibles still manage to shine through, despite the harnesses placed upon them.
I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who has worked in book publishing, news media, and pop music over many years (including a stint working for The KLF's record label, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932055)
What you're highlighting is that art's value proposition is different from the value proposition of typical businesses. But not that artists are somehow free from having to worry about basic economics.
Many artists would rather blow up their careers than make work solely for business reasons.
There's a huge cadre of content creators and entertainers who are happy to do that, but - as the previous post says - their work is typically entirely forgettable. Even when it's commercially successful.
And successful original creators usually have business managers to deal with "basic economics."
The ideal for most artists is complete creative freedom and an open budget. Not many get there, and not everyone who does get there produces something memorable. But it happens occasionally, and it's usually far more interesting than create-to-market content.
Again, you're arguing a distinction which the author agrees with. From the article:
> Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy.
I think perhaps you're getting hung up on some semantic quibble rather than focusing on the broader point. "Artist", "professional artist", "artist for a living", "someone who spends most of their hours making art but also needs to eat". Choose whichever term satisfies your complaint. These people need money to live, that's just how the world works.
aren't most of these just direct copies of some other game that went famous? e.g. Dark Souls set a genre "souls-like", Stardew Valley copied an old game but we can say they started the resurgence or development of cozy management games...
There is a great line in the book Narconomics [0] that compares the "value added" of creating high end paintings to narcotics. He points out that the input (paint, coca leaves) are VERY cheap. The end product (high end paintings, cocaine) is very expensive.
(I believe he makes this point to show that raising the price of inputs slightly has no real bearing on the price at the end given the size of the margins)
Paintings are really different kind of animal.
You can share a photograph of a painting, but it's, just, not the painting. A rip of a CD is nearly identical experientially.
There are many who, however, sell tapes, MiniDiscs, SD cards and other obscure formats with a small but serious following.
But the gallery takes 50% leaving you a gross income of $12k. Then you pay for your supplies and work expenses. If that's all you do, you end up way below the poverty line.
Every so often the invisible hand picks someone off the streets, but it happens much less often than it might.
It is worth pointing out what this artist's practice actually is. The audience here might be afraid of conjectures around the subjective phenomena of "taste", so let me propose this:
That thing that everyone complains about here when you make an interesting app, put it up, and there's a cheaper Chinese produced version of it within a month that's got a better ranking in the app store than yours? That's what this guy is doing in art terms. The "product" is derivative, and frankly, so is the hustle. That's not why most of us make art, and his work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads (much less the "art world" in general) who are typically optimizing for innovation in the field.
I would argue that this guy doesn't really need to be an artist, in the same way that we don't really need the 50th knockoff of the same app. Sure he can do it and I guess good on him for making some money from it, but those are separate questions compared to those of most artists. He could use those same skills he discussed to sell used cars or vapes or something. Or maybe just be a programmer and "ship"? Notice that he doesn't even attempt to explain what is novel or contextually relevant about his work, or even where his desire to do it, as opposed to selling any other product, comes from?
Personally, I use my teaching to create economic space for myself to not need to be in thrall to a flippant and cruel "market". I have some basic rules for my gallery (no sales to arms dealers, no sales to oil industry, leaning that way towards AI/tech tbh) but one of the reasons I have a gallery, in addition to lightening my cognitive load of all the admin and sales in general, is because I suspect it would damage my capacity to make cutting-edge work if I knew how the sausages were made. It's most certainly not the only way to do it, it's just how I've landed. I usually advise my students starting out to follow the Phillip Glass method (really, the 1970s-90s method): get a part-time job that pays the most you can get but that does the work that will kill your mind the least, so you have at least 1 extra day and the mental space to do your 'real' work with that 1 day plus the weekend. Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat. I will admit it is getting much harder to do this now, so my advice may be outdated.
Anyway, I'm being snarky, and he would correctly argue it's gatekeeping. But just a bit of context for the discussion here.
But the other, and this is the vast, VAST majority of people, create content. Not to be too disparaging, but if the objective is a paycheck then that's what is being made. And this is everywhere - marketing, digital design, video game assets, book series, commissions, etc.
Yes it takes artistic skills to do it, but is it "art"? Is it something (as the comment I'm replying to says) "novel or contextually relevant"? Or is it doing what needs doing because the boss says so?
I think it's important to make this distinction. And that's also the gist of people who want to do art as their day job - there's plenty of work, but you have to accept you're doing what other people want you to do instead of try to do something new.
Sounds like you make money partially by teaching and partially by gallery sales. Which are two of the commercially viable paths that are mentioned in this essay.
> Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat.
The point of this article is simply that the above will not happen by accident.
I think the point about aesthetics is particularly useful to rebut here because it conflates aesthetics with taste. One is a personal preference that's subjective and not always interesting to argue about. But aesthetic evaluation is a rigorous discipline with criteria, history, and shared standards developed over thousands of years. This is what I meant when I say the work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads, because this is what they are doing.
To reframe (again) in HN terms: imagine someone who built a successful SaaS product writing an essay called "How to Be a Scientist" and the core advice is to run your lab like a business, find "hypothesis-market fit," and if your research isn't getting cited, just research something else entirely. A working scientist would find this almost incoherent. The business thinking isn't irrelevant to running a lab, however it confuses commercializing the outputs of a discipline with doing the very point of the discipline itself. When scientists do optimize for citations, and in academia they have to sometimes ("publish or perish"), the scientific community generally regards it as a corruption of the process, not good practice.
They make that assumption throughout, but the most straight forward way to make a living as an artist is to apply for a job.
For some types of art, the norm is to be an employee. It's mostly game studios that need people who can make nice 3D models.
There are languages where there's a distinction between artists and painters.
They stopped being an artist with that one line.
His response still resonates with me after 30 years.
It’s the same for starting a winery: “If you want to make $1M, start with $10M.”
He basically said the same only it was the record labels that footed the bill. I enrolled in college the end of that summer.
Moral of the story, don’t be on the fence. Commit. The part about it being a business, fact. That’s the only way you’re going to make a living with your art.
Love that quote!
I don’t want to criticize that path - because being paid as an artist is a millennia-old thing. The idea that true artists don’t work for money is something that came out of the Romantic era, and many, many world famous historical artists like Da Vinci or Michelangelo were doing a job for rich clients. But it seems to lock you into a path where you need to replicate the same style over and over again, because that’s what you’re known for.
There’s a great little scene in the Basquiat movie about this:
I'm talking about the same kind of work. The same style, so people can recognize you and don’t get confused. Once you’re famous, airborne, you gotta keep doing it in the same way. Even after it’s boring. Unless you want people to really get mad at you…which they will anyway.
https://youtu.be/hfI1YAo32fc?si=05msdQY9-SCJAMhX
I think the Phillip Glass solution of doing a completely unrelated job is probably a better solution, IF you’re trying to focus on expression. It also gives you more material for creating; if you read many writers and artists’ bios, their day jobs directly impacted their work.
My favorite example being Moby Dick - could someone without years of whaling experience even begin to conceive of that book?
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
One reason to not move to Ireland is that housing is very expensive, there are plenty of other problems too.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
His store is literally just the same image of a generic honeybear… is he selling $10k plus a month of that same honeybear print?
They have a 9-5 and do the fun stuff on the side.
Not as fun but you gotta eat.
I don’t mean that it’s without merit just that although these things live in the same space they are not the same.
also don't expect your art to pay your rent, because then your work will follow the market and it will suck. your spirit will suffer, too.
Any recommendations for getting exposure to other on-the-way-to-being-popular artists like the X-Ray one that was highlighted?
Calling Mozart’s works “songs” is ignorant.
Mozart wrote some songs (“lieder”, or art songs for voice and piano), but his work spans operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, masses and other sacred music, and solo piano works.
Not pirated music. Pirate music.
shrug
I've got multiple hours of music in different genres and get 50 views in 10 years...
Your value as an artist depends not on the quality of your art, but mostly by your ability to sell yourself to and into service to these cArtells. Like any scam demanding free labour and enthusiasm by the young, the art industry has an aura that it projects to scoop up daydreamers and those rebelling.