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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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

> 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)

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)

0 - https://amzn.to/4r8fIJP

Paintings are really different kind of animal.

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.

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?

His store is literally just the same image of a generic honeybear… is he selling $10k plus a month of that same honeybear print?

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.

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.

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.

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.