8 ms·

The Struggling Artist at 86

81 points by wallflower 9y ago

nyc111 9y ago
Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and accepted poverty and hunger. Picasso did not compromise. Same with Van Gogh. Paintings on their own have no value. Buyers pay for the life story of the painters. The more heroic is your life the more expensive your paintings. Painter's job is to market himself in order to create a life mythology. This guy just painted. He did not create a myth around his life.
- galfarragem 9y ago
  Great comment. Despite knowing several artists - I made artistic studies and used to follow the art scene - I'm yet to know a real artist. It takes a lot of courage to be one.
  - felipemnoa 9y ago
    Could you please define what a real artist is to you? Not trying to be snide but rather really curious. This is a question coming from an engineer that sometimes has to try to be a bit artistic (and failing catastrophically) on some of his works.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      If I could duplicate the work in a weekend, it isn't real art :-)
      - felipemnoa 9y ago
        I'm not sure about that. Coming up with something new that millions of people like is the hard part. It matters not if you can duplicate it easily. Just look at Minecraft, compared to AAA games it is simple, yet its simplicity is genius.
        WalterBright 9y ago
        I'm not suggesting the converse is true - just because something took a lot of effort/skill to create doesn't necessarily make it art. Simplicity is often genius, I agree with that, but I also don't see Minecraft as a work of art.
      - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
        i think your talking about “craft” not art. i dont think skill required to create is the big factor, i think its more about your choices. but i conceed that the line is blurred and there are counterexampled
    - galfarragem 9y ago
      Try to dissect the parent comment, is really spot on. I can't explain better. Some extra hints: You are using the word artistic when you should use the word creative instead. An artist, sometimes, is not even the best painter, musician or sculptor. An artist is somebody that has the courage to live life trully according his way - being innovative by definition - and not to please somebody else. Examples of artists (IMHO): Jim Morrison, Salvador Dali, Picasso, Basquiat, Paul Gauguin became one when abbandoned his life in Paris and went painting natives in Pacific islands in 19 century, probably Madonna and Michael Jackson while younger, probably Trump.. Jesus Christ..
      - felipemnoa 9y ago
        Thanks for the comment. Replacing "artistic" with "creative" really helps. Gives the whole thing a different perspective.
- pcurve 9y ago
  Your comment reminded me of story of Marco Pierre White before he became famous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xCIstDBaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xCIstDBaI Uncompromising, relentless, with a lot of luck too (which he completely acknowledges in the video played a big part). But luck will only find you if you put yourself out there to be found, which White did.
  - nyc111 9y ago
    Thanks for this link. I didn’t know who he was. I found his story inspirational. He says some chefs are artists. This may be true but there is a fundamental difference between a chef and a fine artist such as a painter. Chef’s product is useful. He has customers. There are well-defined standards for excellence such as the Michelin stars. But what an artist produces by definition is useless. Must be useless. Otherwise it will be denigrated as “not art but illustration,” or “decoration” or “commercial.” So the problem is to find a value system for something which is useless.
- willart4food 9y ago
  Not always, look at Jeff Koons and other more recent top artists.
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    Can I look at any other recent artist but Koons?
- crispinb 9y ago
  The idea that there is some One True Path to becoming an Artist (as if either path or role were a consequence of universal natural law) is myth-making at its most obtuse. Even a cursory glance at art history will show the heroic myth is anything but universal. There are tortured artists yet others who are at the peak of mental health. There are poor artists, rich ones, uncompromising artists, artists who'll sell their soul for a drink or a fuck, artists who beat their partners, those who die young, or live to a ripe old age; organised artists, yet others who can barely find their studio. A shorthand: there's no such thing as 'an artist' (let alone a 'real artist').
  - tmh79 9y ago
    There is a huge difference between "all great artists did X" and "there is nothing particularly in common between all great artists". My intuition is telling me that the truth is definitely in the middle, and if there was some way to perform a "clustering" algorithm on artist's lives/work/legacy/commercial success we would see some clear patterns emerge around certain "archetypes" or "personas" of artists, and this guy doesn't seem to fit into one.
    - meric 9y ago
      It is natural for one’s intuition to be in the middle of one’s perception of two extremes. :)
    - crispinb 9y ago
      Fair enough, you're right that there would surely be patterns. But there's no advance reason to think these would line up with popular stereotypes. PCA & factor analysis often come up with highly unintuitive components! And unless the fit was spectacular, there'd be many 'great artists' falling outside of its net, so we'd just be falling back to judging the work, not the person's life.
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    As a corollary, is there no such thing as 'art'? Are you someone who would you say "anything can be art"?
- briandear 9y ago
  Actually Van Gogh didn’t create a myth either— that cake much later. But I still agree with your points..
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    "cake," you say? https://www.google.com/search?q=Van+Gogh+cake&rlz=1C1CHMO_enUS568US569&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ6rqQmsfYAhWjRN8KHSULAPIQ_AUICigB&biw=1600&bih=720 https://www.google.com/search?q=Van+Gogh+cake&rlz=1C1CHMO_en...
- taurath 9y ago
  What’s the mythology of Thomas Kinkades life?
  - gt_ 9y ago
    I love this example. Kinkade is considered an 'outsider artist', which is a category an artist falls in when they are successful but not cool or young, like a celebrity. The "artist's story" being discussed in most of these comments is more like a brand. If an artist is a brand, parent's comment is supported. If an artist is a commodity of skill and intellect, parent's comment is a farce. The same goes for if an artist is a celebrity. More and more every day, successful artists must be feasible celebrities. The overlap of artist and celebrity marks something of an end to commercial Art's intellectual integrity, which is maintained only through symbolic links such as the insistence that artists have an MFA. This requirement came about following conceptualism. For example, Rothko, who the article's subject was shown beside in the 1950s, was a middle-aged philosopher with no art school experience and a miserable origin story, which did not matter then. Note a commitment to intellect did, which was not assumed when one partook in the dealings of Madison Ave. Contemporary art critics would like you to confuse conceptualism with abstract expressionism. Don't do it. The artist in the article exemplifies the difference. Conceptualism is popularly defined by an incomprehensible history and a host of needless exaggerations around what an art object is. A more likely history is that conceptualism is an opportunist side effect of abstract expressionism, which was a highly intellectual and honest project. Conceptualism asks what can be art?, which simultaneously allowed artists to become their art. This uncoincidentally occurred alongside an explosion of popular obsession with celebrity. To have a good artist story is to have a story worthy of celebrity fame, which is another topic entirely. The point here is that conceptualism is not, despite popular manipulation, a legitimate or interesting art movement. It is a flash-pan quasi-philosophical excuse for quasi-intellectualism in art. Conceptualism makes the celebrity nonsense quasi-reasonable, so it was adopted as the origin story for the current contemporary Art world as a whole, which depends on notions of celebrity to compete in such a commercial society. Note Warhol stands out for having actively subsumed Madison Ave. with his intellect, not in place of it.
- gnud 9y ago
  This mythology surrounding the suffering artist is pretty much a fairly modern invention. That's not to say that earlier artists didn't struggle - but it was not fetishished in the same way. Mozart, Handel both had wealthy patrons, and made music for their use. Mozart also made quite a lot of fairly commercial music. Bach and Teleman both worked for the church. Was Rembrandt a worse painter than Van Gogh, since he had wealthy patrons?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- unicornporn 9y ago
  To be honest, this guys approach to creating a myth around himself seems much more compelling and unique to me. As is the (post mortem) Vivian Maier story.
- TipVFL 9y ago
  "He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and accepted poverty and hunger. Picasso did not compromise. Same with Van Gogh." I'm not sure that Van Gogh is a great example of someone who never compromised or gave up. He wanted to be a preacher, but nobody liked him. He also painted, and continued that after giving up on preaching. But nobody liked his paintings either, so he killed himself.
  - Forge36 9y ago
    He's not an example I'd advise following. But your summary is an apt example of creating a story. Even his method of death is still discussed: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/did-vincent-van-gogh-commit-suicide-or-was-dutch-painter-killed-by-an-acquaintance-8754984.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/did...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That describes one very narrow and ahistorical approach to art marketing, and conceives of 'value' in purely monetary terms.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
claudiulodro 9y ago
> “Harry’s never been a salesman,” said Mary Bertschmann, his wife of more than 50 years. “He didn’t get his art out there for them to see.” Like pretty much everything in life, it all comes back to marketing. In order for people to want a specific artist's art they have to know the artist exists and they have to be familiar with his work. The more people that know, the more people will want the art, and the more valuable it will be. For example, a Rothko is worth millions, but if I paint a large fuzzy colored rectangle it's worth practically nothing. People know about Rothko, what he was doing, and why. His art has a well-known, proven track record of being a good investment and buyers already know this. Even in art, it doesn't matter how good the product is if nobody knows about it.
- megaman22 9y ago
  God, Rothkos... nobody has ever been able to explain why I should care about him or his fuzzy rectangles. And I was engaged to an artist that loved him...
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > nobody has ever been able to explain why I should care about him or his fuzzy rectangles. I mean he's arguably the best painter of all time, because while everyone else was trying to win the game of showing off how good they were at painting, he was just trying to make something that looked good on people's walls.
    - yesenadam 9y ago
      If you're serious (not sure), that would make him arguably the best painter of his time and place. But all time? Let's hear an argument for that. (I don't say, a good one)
  - klodolph 9y ago
    If you have not seen a Rothko in person, you may want to postpone judgment a bit. I've known a few people who have independently told me that they didn't get Rothko until they went to a museum with his work.
benbenolson 9y ago
No wonder he's still struggling, his art isn't good.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    Would you have said the same if his comment was "It's a wonder he's still struggling, his art is very good."
    - dang 9y ago
      Not necessarily. Empty positive comments aren't as bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. It would be different if we got to a point where empty positive comments were the main threat to quality on HN, but we're far from that.
- jxramos 9y ago
  Makes me think about something I recently heard from the Dirty Jobs guy about not following your passion but rather opportunity; basically he argued that passion is no guarantee that you'll actually be good at something. https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o
mattbierner 9y ago
Wish there was a better proxy for the value of an artist than what their works sell for. For example, how many people did this guy influence, how did his work change art or how people understand the world? Neither was really discussed in the article
- egypturnash 9y ago
  His day job was "working as a freelance graphic designer creating logos, packaging and advertising for brands like Pond’s cold cream and Bufferin." So he may have anonymously influenced a ton of people to buy one brand of painkiller or another. He also lived in Cleveland from about 1952-1961, which means there's a not insignificant chance he may have done work for American Greetings. Which means that maybe his art was on some number of cards that began or ended a relationship. That's an influence, I think? Probably an anonymous one, though. It sounds like pretty much everything he's drawn or painted for himself is still in his apartment. So most of it hasn't had any chance to influence anyone or their understanding of the world. This may change now that he has people in the NYC gallery scene becoming interested in his work as a new artist to promote as worth investing in. Or it may not; the few pieces of his work shown in the article didn't strike me as saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times by the "New York School" of 50s/60s abstract expressionists that he exhibited next to back then. YMMV, abstract expressionism ain't my thing in general.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  > For example, how many people did this guy influence The fantastic site WikiArt includes influences, as seen here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt
pmorici 9y ago
Reads more like a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't save for retirement than a story of a struggling artist
- brudgers 9y ago
  He's 86. Fifty years ago in 1958, when he was a young 26, prudent retirement planning was getting a good stable job with a pension. Forth years ago in 1968, when he was 36, prudent retirement planning was holding a stable job with a pension. 1978, he was 46 and prudence was still a pension. Even thirty years ago in 1988, it was the same for someone at 56. Now twenty years ago, when he was 66, new employees were typically being put in 401k plans rather than pensions, but in 1998 he was 66 and retirement age. The world changed in ways that were not consistent with conventional retirement wisdom. Or to put it another way, people looked at the piles of money sitting in pensions and figured out a way to get their hands on it because that was their full time job. For what it's worth, there are people who spend all day everyday thinking about your retirement savings becoming their money because skating to where the conventional retirement wisdom for retirement is going is still a job people have. For what it's worth, a lot of people who had retirement savings saw that money shrink by 40-60% in 2008-2009. There's no coming back from that even with ten years of 7% net growth, you're still behind inflation without drawing any of the capital and profits...and you're not going to get ten years of 7% net growth without extraordinary good luck.
  - rileymat2 9y ago
    > and you're not going to get ten years of 7% net growth without extraordinary good luck. Typically, I would agree, however in the cited time period I would not. From the middle of 2009 to now the DJI is up 180%. Significantly more than the 7%. From Peak 2007, that money is up 90% since 2007. By simply holding and not selling broad index funds, you would have been fine.
    - brudgers 9y ago
      Unlike real portfolios, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gets to replace losers with winners. Dropped by the DJI since 2008 are: + Alitra, Honeywell for BOA and Chevron: Remember Honeywell? + AIG for Kraft Foods: AIG was worth close to $0 and Kraft was worth something and so the DJI went up because averaging in something is better than averaging in nothing. + Citigroup, GM for Cisco and Travelers: GM was at about $10 and getting bailed out by the government. Consumer spending was down for Citi. The internet was exploding and Travelers had cash reserves to invest in the down market. + Kraft for United Health Group. More money in fixing the problems that come from eating Cheez Whiz than selling it. + Alcoa, BOA, HP for Goldman Sachs, Nike, Visa. Remember HP? + ATT for Apple: Replacing the ~$50 ATT with the ~$500 Apple made the average go up. If you can swap out shares in your portfolio similarly, my advice is to do so. The conventional advice is to play the market because the DJI is up. It doesn't explain how the DJI works and that you can't replicate its performance. And if you are retired, you have to live off the money and the size of your pile is shrinking not growing. The conventional advice comes from an industry that has no problem using your life savings for its own purposes.

81 points by wallflower 9y ago

Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and accepted poverty and hunger. Picasso did not compromise. Same with Van Gogh. Paintings on their own have no value. Buyers pay for the life story of the painters. The more heroic is your life the more expensive your paintings. Painter's job is to market himself in order to create a life mythology. This guy just painted. He did not create a myth around his life.

galfarragem 9y ago
Great comment. Despite knowing several artists - I made artistic studies and used to follow the art scene - I'm yet to know a real artist. It takes a lot of courage to be one.
- felipemnoa 9y ago
  Could you please define what a real artist is to you? Not trying to be snide but rather really curious. This is a question coming from an engineer that sometimes has to try to be a bit artistic (and failing catastrophically) on some of his works.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    If I could duplicate the work in a weekend, it isn't real art :-)
    - felipemnoa 9y ago
      I'm not sure about that. Coming up with something new that millions of people like is the hard part. It matters not if you can duplicate it easily. Just look at Minecraft, compared to AAA games it is simple, yet its simplicity is genius.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        I'm not suggesting the converse is true - just because something took a lot of effort/skill to create doesn't necessarily make it art. Simplicity is often genius, I agree with that, but I also don't see Minecraft as a work of art.
    - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
      i think your talking about “craft” not art. i dont think skill required to create is the big factor, i think its more about your choices. but i conceed that the line is blurred and there are counterexampled
  - galfarragem 9y ago
    Try to dissect the parent comment, is really spot on. I can't explain better. Some extra hints: You are using the word artistic when you should use the word creative instead. An artist, sometimes, is not even the best painter, musician or sculptor. An artist is somebody that has the courage to live life trully according his way - being innovative by definition - and not to please somebody else. Examples of artists (IMHO): Jim Morrison, Salvador Dali, Picasso, Basquiat, Paul Gauguin became one when abbandoned his life in Paris and went painting natives in Pacific islands in 19 century, probably Madonna and Michael Jackson while younger, probably Trump.. Jesus Christ..
    - felipemnoa 9y ago
      Thanks for the comment. Replacing "artistic" with "creative" really helps. Gives the whole thing a different perspective.
pcurve 9y ago
Your comment reminded me of story of Marco Pierre White before he became famous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xCIstDBaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xCIstDBaI Uncompromising, relentless, with a lot of luck too (which he completely acknowledges in the video played a big part). But luck will only find you if you put yourself out there to be found, which White did.
- nyc111 9y ago
  Thanks for this link. I didn’t know who he was. I found his story inspirational. He says some chefs are artists. This may be true but there is a fundamental difference between a chef and a fine artist such as a painter. Chef’s product is useful. He has customers. There are well-defined standards for excellence such as the Michelin stars. But what an artist produces by definition is useless. Must be useless. Otherwise it will be denigrated as “not art but illustration,” or “decoration” or “commercial.” So the problem is to find a value system for something which is useless.
willart4food 9y ago
Not always, look at Jeff Koons and other more recent top artists.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  Can I look at any other recent artist but Koons?
crispinb 9y ago
The idea that there is some One True Path to becoming an Artist (as if either path or role were a consequence of universal natural law) is myth-making at its most obtuse. Even a cursory glance at art history will show the heroic myth is anything but universal. There are tortured artists yet others who are at the peak of mental health. There are poor artists, rich ones, uncompromising artists, artists who'll sell their soul for a drink or a fuck, artists who beat their partners, those who die young, or live to a ripe old age; organised artists, yet others who can barely find their studio. A shorthand: there's no such thing as 'an artist' (let alone a 'real artist').
- tmh79 9y ago
  There is a huge difference between "all great artists did X" and "there is nothing particularly in common between all great artists". My intuition is telling me that the truth is definitely in the middle, and if there was some way to perform a "clustering" algorithm on artist's lives/work/legacy/commercial success we would see some clear patterns emerge around certain "archetypes" or "personas" of artists, and this guy doesn't seem to fit into one.
  - meric 9y ago
    It is natural for one’s intuition to be in the middle of one’s perception of two extremes. :)
  - crispinb 9y ago
    Fair enough, you're right that there would surely be patterns. But there's no advance reason to think these would line up with popular stereotypes. PCA & factor analysis often come up with highly unintuitive components! And unless the fit was spectacular, there'd be many 'great artists' falling outside of its net, so we'd just be falling back to judging the work, not the person's life.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  As a corollary, is there no such thing as 'art'? Are you someone who would you say "anything can be art"?
briandear 9y ago
Actually Van Gogh didn’t create a myth either— that cake much later. But I still agree with your points..
- InternetUser 9y ago
  "cake," you say? https://www.google.com/search?q=Van+Gogh+cake&rlz=1C1CHMO_enUS568US569&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ6rqQmsfYAhWjRN8KHSULAPIQ_AUICigB&biw=1600&bih=720 https://www.google.com/search?q=Van+Gogh+cake&rlz=1C1CHMO_en...
taurath 9y ago
What’s the mythology of Thomas Kinkades life?
- gt_ 9y ago
  I love this example. Kinkade is considered an 'outsider artist', which is a category an artist falls in when they are successful but not cool or young, like a celebrity. The "artist's story" being discussed in most of these comments is more like a brand. If an artist is a brand, parent's comment is supported. If an artist is a commodity of skill and intellect, parent's comment is a farce. The same goes for if an artist is a celebrity. More and more every day, successful artists must be feasible celebrities. The overlap of artist and celebrity marks something of an end to commercial Art's intellectual integrity, which is maintained only through symbolic links such as the insistence that artists have an MFA. This requirement came about following conceptualism. For example, Rothko, who the article's subject was shown beside in the 1950s, was a middle-aged philosopher with no art school experience and a miserable origin story, which did not matter then. Note a commitment to intellect did, which was not assumed when one partook in the dealings of Madison Ave. Contemporary art critics would like you to confuse conceptualism with abstract expressionism. Don't do it. The artist in the article exemplifies the difference. Conceptualism is popularly defined by an incomprehensible history and a host of needless exaggerations around what an art object is. A more likely history is that conceptualism is an opportunist side effect of abstract expressionism, which was a highly intellectual and honest project. Conceptualism asks what can be art?, which simultaneously allowed artists to become their art. This uncoincidentally occurred alongside an explosion of popular obsession with celebrity. To have a good artist story is to have a story worthy of celebrity fame, which is another topic entirely. The point here is that conceptualism is not, despite popular manipulation, a legitimate or interesting art movement. It is a flash-pan quasi-philosophical excuse for quasi-intellectualism in art. Conceptualism makes the celebrity nonsense quasi-reasonable, so it was adopted as the origin story for the current contemporary Art world as a whole, which depends on notions of celebrity to compete in such a commercial society. Note Warhol stands out for having actively subsumed Madison Ave. with his intellect, not in place of it.
gnud 9y ago
This mythology surrounding the suffering artist is pretty much a fairly modern invention. That's not to say that earlier artists didn't struggle - but it was not fetishished in the same way. Mozart, Handel both had wealthy patrons, and made music for their use. Mozart also made quite a lot of fairly commercial music. Bach and Teleman both worked for the church. Was Rembrandt a worse painter than Van Gogh, since he had wealthy patrons?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
unicornporn 9y ago
To be honest, this guys approach to creating a myth around himself seems much more compelling and unique to me. As is the (post mortem) Vivian Maier story.
TipVFL 9y ago
"He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and accepted poverty and hunger. Picasso did not compromise. Same with Van Gogh." I'm not sure that Van Gogh is a great example of someone who never compromised or gave up. He wanted to be a preacher, but nobody liked him. He also painted, and continued that after giving up on preaching. But nobody liked his paintings either, so he killed himself.
- Forge36 9y ago
  He's not an example I'd advise following. But your summary is an apt example of creating a story. Even his method of death is still discussed: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/did-vincent-van-gogh-commit-suicide-or-was-dutch-painter-killed-by-an-acquaintance-8754984.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/did...
anigbrowl 9y ago
That describes one very narrow and ahistorical approach to art marketing, and conceives of 'value' in purely monetary terms.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

claudiulodro 9y ago

> “Harry’s never been a salesman,” said Mary Bertschmann, his wife of more than 50 years. “He didn’t get his art out there for them to see.” Like pretty much everything in life, it all comes back to marketing. In order for people to want a specific artist's art they have to know the artist exists and they have to be familiar with his work. The more people that know, the more people will want the art, and the more valuable it will be. For example, a Rothko is worth millions, but if I paint a large fuzzy colored rectangle it's worth practically nothing. People know about Rothko, what he was doing, and why. His art has a well-known, proven track record of being a good investment and buyers already know this. Even in art, it doesn't matter how good the product is if nobody knows about it.

megaman22 9y ago
God, Rothkos... nobody has ever been able to explain why I should care about him or his fuzzy rectangles. And I was engaged to an artist that loved him...
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > nobody has ever been able to explain why I should care about him or his fuzzy rectangles. I mean he's arguably the best painter of all time, because while everyone else was trying to win the game of showing off how good they were at painting, he was just trying to make something that looked good on people's walls.
  - yesenadam 9y ago
    If you're serious (not sure), that would make him arguably the best painter of his time and place. But all time? Let's hear an argument for that. (I don't say, a good one)
- klodolph 9y ago
  If you have not seen a Rothko in person, you may want to postpone judgment a bit. I've known a few people who have independently told me that they didn't get Rothko until they went to a museum with his work.

benbenolson 9y ago

No wonder he's still struggling, his art isn't good.

dang 9y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  Would you have said the same if his comment was "It's a wonder he's still struggling, his art is very good."
  - dang 9y ago
    Not necessarily. Empty positive comments aren't as bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. It would be different if we got to a point where empty positive comments were the main threat to quality on HN, but we're far from that.
jxramos 9y ago
Makes me think about something I recently heard from the Dirty Jobs guy about not following your passion but rather opportunity; basically he argued that passion is no guarantee that you'll actually be good at something. https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o https://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o

mattbierner 9y ago

Wish there was a better proxy for the value of an artist than what their works sell for. For example, how many people did this guy influence, how did his work change art or how people understand the world? Neither was really discussed in the article

egypturnash 9y ago
His day job was "working as a freelance graphic designer creating logos, packaging and advertising for brands like Pond’s cold cream and Bufferin." So he may have anonymously influenced a ton of people to buy one brand of painkiller or another. He also lived in Cleveland from about 1952-1961, which means there's a not insignificant chance he may have done work for American Greetings. Which means that maybe his art was on some number of cards that began or ended a relationship. That's an influence, I think? Probably an anonymous one, though. It sounds like pretty much everything he's drawn or painted for himself is still in his apartment. So most of it hasn't had any chance to influence anyone or their understanding of the world. This may change now that he has people in the NYC gallery scene becoming interested in his work as a new artist to promote as worth investing in. Or it may not; the few pieces of his work shown in the article didn't strike me as saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times by the "New York School" of 50s/60s abstract expressionists that he exhibited next to back then. YMMV, abstract expressionism ain't my thing in general.
InternetUser 9y ago
> For example, how many people did this guy influence The fantastic site WikiArt includes influences, as seen here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt

pmorici 9y ago

Reads more like a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't save for retirement than a story of a struggling artist

brudgers 9y ago
He's 86. Fifty years ago in 1958, when he was a young 26, prudent retirement planning was getting a good stable job with a pension. Forth years ago in 1968, when he was 36, prudent retirement planning was holding a stable job with a pension. 1978, he was 46 and prudence was still a pension. Even thirty years ago in 1988, it was the same for someone at 56. Now twenty years ago, when he was 66, new employees were typically being put in 401k plans rather than pensions, but in 1998 he was 66 and retirement age. The world changed in ways that were not consistent with conventional retirement wisdom. Or to put it another way, people looked at the piles of money sitting in pensions and figured out a way to get their hands on it because that was their full time job. For what it's worth, there are people who spend all day everyday thinking about your retirement savings becoming their money because skating to where the conventional retirement wisdom for retirement is going is still a job people have. For what it's worth, a lot of people who had retirement savings saw that money shrink by 40-60% in 2008-2009. There's no coming back from that even with ten years of 7% net growth, you're still behind inflation without drawing any of the capital and profits...and you're not going to get ten years of 7% net growth without extraordinary good luck.
- rileymat2 9y ago
  > and you're not going to get ten years of 7% net growth without extraordinary good luck. Typically, I would agree, however in the cited time period I would not. From the middle of 2009 to now the DJI is up 180%. Significantly more than the 7%. From Peak 2007, that money is up 90% since 2007. By simply holding and not selling broad index funds, you would have been fine.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    Unlike real portfolios, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gets to replace losers with winners. Dropped by the DJI since 2008 are: + Alitra, Honeywell for BOA and Chevron: Remember Honeywell? + AIG for Kraft Foods: AIG was worth close to $0 and Kraft was worth something and so the DJI went up because averaging in something is better than averaging in nothing. + Citigroup, GM for Cisco and Travelers: GM was at about $10 and getting bailed out by the government. Consumer spending was down for Citi. The internet was exploding and Travelers had cash reserves to invest in the down market. + Kraft for United Health Group. More money in fixing the problems that come from eating Cheez Whiz than selling it. + Alcoa, BOA, HP for Goldman Sachs, Nike, Visa. Remember HP? + ATT for Apple: Replacing the ~$50 ATT with the ~$500 Apple made the average go up. If you can swap out shares in your portfolio similarly, my advice is to do so. The conventional advice is to play the market because the DJI is up. It doesn't explain how the DJI works and that you can't replicate its performance. And if you are retired, you have to live off the money and the size of your pile is shrinking not growing. The conventional advice comes from an industry that has no problem using your life savings for its own purposes.