Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I'm an artist.

Honestly I'm not gonna hold my breath for this GIANT SOCIAL CHANGE where ART IS IMPORTANT!!!! to happen. Right now pretty much all creative media that are digitizable are passed around online. Music, movies, comics, still art - if it's not painfully obscure, you can probably get it for free on the bittorrents.

Hell, if it's painfully obscure, you can also probably get it for free. Maybe you'll tell your friends about it, the thinking goes, and maybe eventually a friend of a friend will feel like buying a book or a t-shirt or pay for a download or otherwise put money in the artist's pocket and give us some faint hope of (a) making enough money to keep a roof over our heads while making the stuff we want to make and (b) actually having people beyond our immediate peers reading/watching/listening to/whatever our stuff.

If we DO actually manage to get to a place where enough people are well off enough in general to be able to spend a lot of their time making art instead of scrambling for enough to live on in a dark caricature of a capitalist nightmare, then it'll only get worse. Because then there will be a LOT more people vying for your attention with their creative work.

Meanwhile, right now? If you're an artist you pretty much have to engage in a constant scramble to look for work to do for other people unless you are at the very top of the food chain. If you're a halfway decent programmer you just have to announce that you're unemployed on LinkedIn and you get spammed by headhunters.

I dunno, maybe I'm just feeling especially valueless because I've just spent all day sitting in a lonely corner of a comics convention, watching maybe a couple hundred people wander by out of the several thousand who are attending the con, and having exactly one person buy something. (If you're in Seattle and doing ECCC this weekend, stop by booth 2503 and say hi!)

Rambling here, but there seems to be some similarity of artists' plight and programmers' plight.

One of the "problems" with art is the low barrier to entry. I've known a lot of people who were 'artists' who didn't really work at anything solid but rather spent some time emoting when the mood struck them then tried to capture that emotion in some sort of sketch or painting or poem. (I also know artists who are working very hard, have their own modes of expression and are trying to keep things together to make a living. Maybe I'll ramble back to them...)

One of the things that has happened to programming in 'recent' years (I'm old) is the barrier to entry for programming has dropped dramatically. For people who have an analytical bent, it's pretty easy to set up a linux box with a bunch of programming tools (even Windows box I suppose), find some tutorials for building web page widgets, and start building stuff.

They can put themselves out on a freelancing site and make short money building crap software. I've hired some freelancers, and every now and then come across one that thinks he is "all that" but he's really crappy. (I had one recently that tried to upsell me to his servers. Now get this: I have my own, with ssh key access, and told me to send me his public key. He sent me his PRIVATE key. He sells hosting. HOLY SHIT!)

There are a lot of people out there that don't know the difference between good and bad- and, for the moment, they don't care enough to ask the questions that allow them to distinguish. They just want their damn blog up with the mouseover animation- or whatever. And they'll pay for it.

At the higher end, programmers have more of a credentialing mechanism (degrees) which aren't perfect, and perhaps are archaic, but can nevertheless provide a first barrier.

As the person who wants the blog with the mouseover widget, I don't know shit about design or art. If I'm buying art, how do I know what's good? How do I know what's worth paying $300 for and what's worth paying $30000 for?

What's different about the people at the top of the food chain? There's a lot of garbage in the system (does every artist still 'play guitar?') and it can make it a real challenge for the authentic practitioners to be visible without some help with the filtering process.

One of the "problems" with art is the low barrier to entry

I used to work in animation. Most people in animation will tell you that it takes you about five years to go from "kid who likes to draw" to "someone who's worth employing in an entry-level job and teaching how to REALLY do things".

As the person who wants the blog with the mouseover widget, I don't know shit about design or art. If I'm buying art, how do I know what's good? How do I know what's worth paying $300 for and what's worth paying $30000 for?

It's a lot EASIER to start to figure this out IMHO. Everyone has eyes, everyone can look at art and say "I like that" or "I don't like that". If you're looking for web design graphics, look at someone's portfolio, does it look good? Hooray, maybe you'll hire them. Code, on the other hand? Nobody but other programmers can look at it and say "this is beautiful/ugly".

It gets harder once you get into the GALLERY art world, where you have a culture that eschews representation and raises up stuff that makes people say "My three-year-old could do that". Honestly I don't understand that stuff either, I am quite happy to be a "lowly" commercial artist who mostly draws sf/fantasy comic books.

Yes, the gallery stuff is difficult. I am working with someone who is trying to crack it. She's someone who works very hard, has developed her own (recognizable, and sometimes featured) style. Still, galleries are tough.

I think my point is that, as an untrained person, I can look at something and say, "I like that." But, how do I know that I like the right stuff? Maybe it doesn't work with the message surrounding it (does that even make sense?). I have no idea how to judge that. How do I know who does?

For the coding analogue, I don't think it's "pretty/beautiful" code (except by proxy). Suppose I write something for you that shows off the art that you want to sell. This is a unique app to you (let's say)- Your plan is to generate traffic by blogging about art, and have your stuff tactically displayed throughout to prompt people to buy it. I build the app, you click on it and it works exactly the way you think it should.

Now, you take the app, integrate it into your site, and stick on adwords because you need to make some short-term cash while you iterate your long-term strategy. But my coding sucks, and my script doesn't play well with adwords, and your site fails in a way that you can't see- perhaps you don't get the credit for the clicks you actually generate.

Mind you, I'm not claiming to have answers (I wish I did). But it may be helpful to compare and contrast the plight of artists with that of other professions that are self-identified. When I was growing up, car mechanics were among those professions also. What creates distinction?

Maybe there are two types of distinction to consider: professional prestige and financial success. Some authors, for example, have high professional prestige but you can't find their work at Hudson News (airport book store). Others are quite the opposite.

If some dude with bunny ears stops by, that was me.

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