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There's a lot of entitlement from "artists" who sit on a moral high horse and expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" while the res

• pcwalton 4y ago
  A lot of people would say the same about programmers.
  • finexplained 4y ago
    Sure, but we actually provide business value and our toolset is applicable to a broad set of problems.
    • trevorboaconstr 4y ago
      ^And both are equally insufferable in their perceived self importance to the world. Too bad I’m not a Roman Emperor, or else I’d host weekly public bouts where I’d pit them against one another in a fight to the death.
    • pcwalton 4y ago
      Obviously artists provide business value. That's why there is such a thing as the entertainment industry.
      • finexplained 4y ago
        The distribution is different. The median programmer provides much more value than the median artist. Additionally math/cs skills apply much more broadly than art skills. The entertainment industry would be much less leveraged without the tools we built for them.
        • hnzix 4y ago
          The median programmer provides much more value than the median artist. An economy is not a society. There is more to the human experience than "number goes up".
    • PurpleRamen 4y ago
      Depends on whom you ask.
  • filoleg 4y ago
    Yeah, but programmers aren't trying to justify higher pay or claim they deserve some special treatment because they are "expressing themselves". Programmers are simply paid what they get paid because businesses they work for can make up that cost (of paying programmers the salary) with profit multiple times over, using the work produced by those programmers.
    • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      Exactly, the markets are clearing just fine with programmers being paid what they are, given the sort of leverage businesses are getting out of them. The same cannot be said for art, the supply is vastly outpacing the demand, especially in light of the power law nature of art and entertainment consumption. But, to +1 the other poster, programmers can be just as deluded as anybody else about their own importance, we don't have to indulge that either.
    • PurpleRamen 4y ago
      > Yeah, but programmers aren't trying to justify higher pay or claim they deserve some special treatment because they are "expressing themselves". Yes, and no. There are entitled developers who think they deserve more than the average worker. And there are those developers who delve into their "Devine art" and are cranky because the world does not appreciate it. Usually those people are to be found around the more exotic languages it seems. Art and IT have a big intersection from my experience. And majority of people in IT and also art are not entitled, nor are they on the Divine Train. It's just that as an outsider, you barely encounter those people, because of which it's harder to get a good picture of the art-scene.
• rafaelero 4y ago
  With the development of AI, it's been quite an experience to see artists grasping the fact that their craft is not the magical thing they think it is.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    DALL·E 2 and co are pretty neat, but the output mostly sucks as art. Good art comes from somewhere, having provenance in person, place, culture, and time. Really great art can be quite moving, and I've yet to see anything AI generated that elicits more than a chuckle or a mild "huh neat" from anyone who doesn't know why it's technically impressive.
    • rafaelero 4y ago
      It's quite simple to verify your assertion. Someone should show people some pieces of art and ask them to rate the quality of each of them. If the rating between human-made art and machine-made art doesn't differ significantly, then we can comfortably say that there is nothing special on art produced by humans. I think I know what the result will be, but hopefully some researcher will carefully investigate this issue.
      • ch4s3 4y ago
        You’re talking about a question of taste, and I’m sure you could find a group of people and some samples where the group prefers the AI generated images. That seems almost tautological. There’s more to art than the mere appeal of an image to random people. Some great art is disturbing, but it is emotionally resonant. No doubt some of these AI images are quite neat to look at, but they’re basically assemblages, high tech collages. It’s a futurist parlor trick. Philosophically art requires consciousness and a conscious will to express something. These AIs aren’t conscious and don’t make art.
        • rafaelero 4y ago
          I don't think you understood what I was saying. It's not about taste, it's about being able to differentiate between human and machine made art using whatever metric people have about what constitutes good art.
• joe_the_user 4y ago
  It saddens me that wanting enough time to develop yourself is considered a " moral high horse" implying "special treatment". Personally, I think virtually anyone should be able to get spartan survival with a part time job giving them enough time develop themselves - or work a full time job to live reasonably well. Reading Samuel Delaney's biographical sketch The Motion of Light On Water, the US seemed to offer that possibility in 1962 but today minimal rent in most places requires two jobs. The same forces that mean those people "laying down cement in 100 degree weather" often can't actually "put a roof over their family's heads" are the forces that keep poor artists for existing in this society.
• Off 4y ago
  I think the entitled artists are generally in it for the fame and what comes with it, that's why most of them think they deserve the special treatment, humble artists actually don't care about that at all, they do it for themselves, they just want to do their thing and lose themselves to the process.
• dogman144 4y ago
  This is a very odd take and aggressive towards artists in a way that makes little sense. First, You’re arguing that rational labor input-output, the harder the better, and the resulting inputs it creates into a system, is the highest ideal or something. You’re missing that Art and various abstractions, to include the social sciences have played a major role in shaping history and our self identities for all of human existence (Homer, anyone?). When this missing started occurring is right around the ‘06 tech boom that put engineering and input output above all else, and by extension destroyed out the protected spaces artists could function in. Coincidently, that’s right around the time the world started to lose its mind by finding meaning making via their iPhones. This engineering-centric dismissal of everything that can’t be quantified is the cause of so many social issues. Your view was also directly present in the Soviet Union, fwiw. I’m not sure what artist insulted you or wherever this take comes form, but you’re really missing some key points of why Art and the resulting high minded artists have existed since the cavemen.
  • sershe 4y ago
    I think the post is spot on. It's not really about how hard is the labor, it's specifically about value produced for others, for which "how much others are willing to pay you" is the best approximation we have. To me, an average artist/band/... is at best, like an average roofer in the world where there are more roofers than houses - they are unnecessary and should do something else, or admit that roofing or art is just a side hobby. At worst, an average artist/band/... (the kind that the GP mentions, and I've certainly met) is like a roofer insisting that their personal roof that they are building on the ground level over a sand pit is inherently noble. I think a better example is sports. On one hand, football players get paid a ton of money, by people who presumably consider it worthwhile, for "just playing a game once a week". On the other, imagine every relatively unimpressive rando on deviantart or whatever played football instead, on the same relatively unimpressive level. Do we need so many football players? Sure, they can do it as a hobby, but in terms of social value/making a living, we certainly don't.
• basscomm 4y ago
  > Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginners who haven't accomplished much yet. Lots of beginners in every field think that they're God's gift to whatever it is that they've just started. They're going to change the world, etc. That comes with the territory of being a beginner. Usually they mellow with age and experience. >I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me. Just because you don't see the hours of training and production that goes into something, doesn't mean it isn't there. I might spend 10,000 hours practicing to spend 200 hours writing a novel that you read in 20 hours. I might spend four years in college and ten years writing a computer program that you'll use once. Lots of artwork is produced as work for hire. That doesn't make it that much different than any other job. A trained professional getting payment for services rendered is how things have worked since antiquity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was commissioned to, not just because he was expressing himself > You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers. You see signs asking you to support local roofers all the time. What do you think all of those commercials on radio, television, print media, billboards, etc. are that advertising all of the roofing services? Roofers produce roofs. Chefs produce food. Artists produce art. It takes labor to produce art, and if you want good art, it also takes years of training and practice. But somehow working to produce art is seen as 'lesser' than doing manual physical labor. It's weird. It's expected that in most professions even beginners deserve to get paid. But the arts are somehow different. There's this expectation that artists should produce works for the benefit of society (and don't forget, 'art' is much more than just drawing pretty pictures, it's also the vast field of fine art, music, movies, television, writing, and a lot of other media) but that the work should be free. There's this unspoken feeling that since lots of art is easy to appreciate, it must have been easy to create, so paying for it is a waste of money. But have you ever tried to paint a picture? Compose a song? Write a novel? It's hard. It takes time. It can take thousands of hours of practice before you make anything good. It's kind of like arguing that a programmer asking for money for the programming work that they do is somehow shaming people into supporting them for typing all day instead of doing real work that commands real pay like bricklaying or cattle ranching.
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  Well said, harsh, but the truth. Expression is obessive to self because its unique to you. A lot of artists expect their expression to be universally profound and expect society to reward them for their contribution. It doesn't work that way. High art world is basically tokenization of wealth and a medium to transfer (ahem..launder) money from one party to another. It is deeply memetic, a value of piece of art is dictated by how much mimesis it embodies amongst the wealthy clan of art collectors and critics. Artist is sort of a secondary artifact here.
• wwweston 4y ago
  > You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers. Nobody asks roofers to work for "exposure." Nobody's telling roofers that a penny per shingle / tile would be "entitled" of them (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv... ). Nobody's arguing that roofers should agree to roof for a pittance and come up with some "hustle" like t-shirts or other roofing merchandise in order to enjoy the privilege of roofing. People do ALL these things with artists. Labor should be paid, that's true. Trade work is valuable, sure. Craft is a matter worthy of respect, certainly. But the idea that most artists (outside of a small fraction) are somehow privileged is so far from the truth that it isn't even wrong.
  • PurpleRamen 4y ago
    I don't know any roofers, but I know many people from others crafts, including my own; and sorry, but no, people trying to pay with exposure or something cheap like a beer or cookies are everywhere, in most trades. Labor is undervalued all the time, especially if someone has no experience with it and does not understand the amount of time necessary for getting something done. And if you are young and starting your business, they try to exploit you even more. This is not limited to art. And Internet just intensified this, as now you have not only the cheapskates from your neighborhood, but of the whole world. Though, with art there is also the part that some people are not seeing it as a real job, but only as a hobby or something you do for our own enjoyment. So they are even more willing to undervalue it.
• PurpleRamen 4y ago
  > yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers. Do roofers need support?
• hoseja 4y ago
  It's the product of culture mostly being hijacked by artistic types and so they implant memes beneficial to them into it disproportionately.
• nottorp 4y ago
  > expect special treatment because they're "expressing a higher truth" I believe it's mostly critics who look for "higher truth" in art?