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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

Cool, but if you can afford to hire an illustrator to make a custom dashboard for your lights and thermostat, you're clearly in the 1%.

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I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.

You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.

$900 for digital art isn't exactly cheap, but you sure as hell don't need to be pull a $750K salary to afford it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1wyyrd6/comm...

Disposable income and being in the 1% are entirely different things.

How much do you they think they paid? By home improvement standards, might not be out of line at all.

I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!

Ever buy any pictures or posters for your wall? Same thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than…$30 a piece for posters vs $900 for this commission.

Perhaps at some point your budget will allow you to buy or commission something more personal that brings you pleasure to look at every day.

I never said it was lack of budget, it's lack of interest. I'd honestly rather have a $30 print of a Picasso, a patent, a blueprint, or a movie poster than pay someone for custom art, nor do I think one needs to buy or commission something for it to have a personal connection (for example the ratty BTTF poster I had in college, or the Chicago Lyric Opera advertisement I saved out of a nursing home dumpster).

Okay, good for you.

You say it like it’s a bad thing?

I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?

Calling $900 "a couple bucks" shows how wide a gap there is between perception and reality though.

And?

Its $100 at most. Thats something majority of people can afford.

*$900, and no, the average person can’t afford $900 for bespoke art (or more likely, has no interest in paying $900 for one). Heck, I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of AI art online and not come to the conclusion the average person would much rather have the same for near free than paying hundreds of dollars. To me, that’s a pretty obvious revealed preference.

The overwhelming majority of people of any income level will never pay to commission any kind of art or even be familiar with the possibility to consider as a practical option.

It's just not a typical thing to do pre or post AI. "Revealed preference" doesn't seem like a useful lens without some basic degree of awareness that a choice even exists.

And on the flip side, I have a friend who commissioned some kind of avatar for social media from an artist friend of friend for the first time in their life. They loved the result a lot and since then have commissioned a bunch of little random things once they realized it was a thing anyone could easily do with a few bucks. For stuff like their WoW character/guild, D&D, social media, etc.

They make less than six figures, each request was <$100 IIRC. Budgeted basically like any other gaming/hobby purchase for personal entertainment.

Idk why people work so cheaply. Less than 100. They're probably working for like 10/hr

But i mean, i dont think he thought of this as an "art-object" more like a ... house-control-kiosk-whatever. And people spend tons of money on those things. Eink-screens for thousands. Control4 for whatever amount. Homey-hub for..300usd? Hue-lights for hundreds etc.

So, sure 900usd or a part of that system is a lot of money and I wouldn't do it. But I've spent 900usd on techthings with a very diminishing amount of return :)

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