Good post. I'd argue this is very similar to solo game development. There's a lot of extra administrative stuff that simply has nothing to do with actually making games and a lot more to do with making a real business. So the framing there is accurate.
As a father of two small children during COVID, I can't begin to thank fnnch enough for his Honey Bear Hunt project: https://upmag.com/honey-bear-fnnch/
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!"
> The Beatles wrote 227 songs, but only 34 hit the Top 10. Do you think they would put out a song that they didn't believe could be a hit? Mozart wrote over 600 songs, but only about 50 of them are widely played. Do you think he purposefully wrote duds? Of course not.
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.
More importantly, the Beatles are one of the few groups that I can listen to the entire album and love every song, and then come back 5 years later and still love the album. There are many successful musicians who have a handful of good songs and the rest of their albums are filler.
While this advice may work for some, I would like to point out that this person is making very popular art. This type of art is most likely easier to sell than what most contemporary artists produce.
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.
great point but I think that even people who create "difficult" art can derive some sort of income from it. in fact, the solopreneurs section points to an opportunity for AI to be a helpful co-pilot on each of those mundane and dreaded tasks listed there. In additional fact, I asked Gemini Pro a while a go to spell out the steps to a successful fine arts career and the output was very similar to this blog's so square-one/concept validation, decision making (eg. given this list of business-relevant events and attendees, which should I prioritize and prepare for) are actions it can take on your behalf or help with.
That said, once a critical number of people start getting the same advice, take the same action then you have another issue to navigate but it would be the same with any tech advancement, eg. the first artists to get their own phone line or a fax machine or a computer ...
Sure, you are right. For the article author's market, many are literally and metaphorically pedestrian, popular and colorful but uncomplicated.
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.
Maybe I'm being thick here, but i still dont quite get how does he earn money from his artwork?
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
Large murals on, for example, commercial buildings or residences are typically commissioned. These are big enough to require scaffolding/lifts and take multiple days to paint; with some exceptions (vacant property) it'd be hard to pull that off without the owner calling the cops. The building owner is paying them for the mural, or in some cases there's city grants or arts council projects.
Lots of muralists document the art/business on youtube! Two I like: Kiptoe and SmoeNova
A bit of both. You have to go to a lot of dinner parties and salons and high society gf etc togethers, and connect the right people to each other, and serendipity happens, and then, before you know it, you've got a mural on the wall.
great post, thank you! I recently started showing and selling my art (I do plotter art and paintings). It’s both exciting and frustrating at times to see how pieces “land” or completely miss.
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.
> Mozart wrote over 600 songs, but only about 50 of them are widely played.
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.
It depends on your art form and what you’re trying to say. Because once you start optimizing your work for sales, you are deliberately going down a certain path.
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.
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?
I'd say painting is quite a different business model than making music. There are different channels, people nowadays don't understand the value of music because they "have" everything on Spotify/Apple Music/whatever and there must be a huge tech behind you to sell good quality of sound. You also can't make your own CD (yes you can, but will it work with a CDR recorder?) and sell it progressively for $100 then for $500...
Painting is a tough business. If you have the talent to spend a month on a painting and then find people will happily pay $2000 for it in a gallery, you are a fantastic artist!
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.
> Art is absolutely an expression of yourself. But your art is not you. Try not to entangle your ego with your art.
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 worked out it's easier to make a living doing something well paid and do the art on the side. Sometimes people pay me for the art if I'm lucky, mostly photographic prints. I wouldn't want to do it the other way around.
Contemporary artist here, with gallery representation. I also teach on, arguably, the best undergrad "fine art" program in the world.
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.
You’re making a point mostly about aesthetics. But regardless of aesthetics, to be a working artist, the artist needs to make money.
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.
Art is basically a value tokken store for the super wealthy and they keep it valuable by limiting the supply to what is "valuable" art by forming one huge cartell. Gallerys, museums, art brokers are either in this cArtel or they are not.
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.
I've seen too many times in real life people who do arts and want to try to sell it not understand that once you switch from a hobby to a business, you need to spend at least 50% of your time on the business/marketing/logistics/etc side of things, hence failing miserably. The best possible outcome that I've seen is that they miraculously hit a nerve on the first hit, become famous, and at some point realize they need to pay taxes and do so in a decent timeframe.
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!
Or delegate that stuff and become a "sellout". Just don't get taken advantage of. Oh, and have actual talent. Or don't, doesn't really matter, if the salesperson has some of their own.
> A jeweler might have high material costs (gold and diamonds), an artist moderate material costs (paint and canvas), and a greeting card company low material costs (paper), but they all have "material costs".
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)
47 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadAny recommendations for getting exposure to other on-the-way-to-being-popular artists like the X-Ray one that was highlighted?
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
Lots of muralists document the art/business on youtube! Two I like: Kiptoe and SmoeNova
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.
I don’t mean that it’s without merit just that although these things live in the same space they are not the same.
There are languages where there's a distinction between artists and painters.
They stopped being an artist with that one line.
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 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?
Paintings are really different kind of animal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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