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Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. I think the original quote is: The best minds of my generation ar

Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. I think the original quote is: The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/) which is very close to article’s paraphrase

photonthug 3y ago
I wonder if the original author knew they were also paraphrasing, riffing on Ginsberg's "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". Glad to see quoteinvestigator mention that context
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Ads have existed long before clicks on and the most talented artists have worked on them long before the most talented programmers thought about making people click on them.
- baliex 3y ago
  That's true and doesn't detract from it being a waste of talent
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  The unsaid context of the quote is that programming is among the most lucrative fields (top 3 large employment fields), and most of the money is programming field comes from ads, which is why the best programmers are working on ads. Artists at ad agencies probably never broke even top twenty jobs by salary.
  - whartung 3y ago
    Is that true though? Are most people working at Google working on Ad tech, or on the services that the ad tech helps pay for? Now, to be clear, I don't consider GMail "ad tech", even though it is ad supported. I don't see anything wrong with someone like Google want to drive traffic through services that are monetized through advertising. Nor Facebook for that matter. I will complain about lock in, dark patterns, and other nefarious things. But you can have good ad supported services without necessarily having all of the bad things. Those just bump your margin and revenue. So, if you feel that the "good" programmers are working on ad tech and analysis, while the "less good" are working on, say, GMail proper, I'd be curious in how that conclusion was drawn. How many people here work on ad tech directly? (vs, some dual use technology that can be used for ad tech.) I know a lot of people, tangentially, indirectly, "6 degrees of separation" kind of thing, and I don't know any of them being directly involved in ad tech. None of the "lead geeks" I'm familiar with are in the field. The closest it got was a friend of mine who worked on Farmville in its heyday, and that's more a dark pattern addiction game than ad tech.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- com2kid 3y ago
  > Ads have existed long before clicks Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2]. Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/ https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/
monkeynotes 3y ago
If they are doing advertising then they are art directors, not artists. The most talented artists make art, it's not something they have a choice in. They will suffer poverty to make their art. Talent isn't in the execution in art, it's in the ideas, and tapestry of the artist's life. > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads This is also not true, because those minds aren't intelligent enough to see the folly of their attention. The best minds see past this and do the work they are driven to do, similar to artists.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  Let’s not over romanticize the starving artist. There are plenty of creative people who could create good, worthy art if they had the means and support to pursue it fully. It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you.
  - monkeynotes 3y ago
    The article literally said "the most talented". The top talent artists are certainly making art, and it is a fact they are driven to do it more than anything else. That's the attitude that makes them "the most talented". I am not romanticising it, it's just how it is. > It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you. Exactly. People make choices in what they do, it has nothing to do with talent being taken out of the market, it's always been this way. There have always been more profitable things to do than making art.
- bena 3y ago
  You do know you can do what you like outside of work, right? You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art. And execution definitely forms part of the talent. We should know that just as well. We all know "the idea guy", the guy who has all the "right" ideas, but just can't seem to actually do the thing required to bring the idea to life. And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts. I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum. It's mostly about execution and the idea actually means very little. The idea of "what if you couldn't make new memories" is the central struggle in two very different movies. In Memento, it's used to tell a detective noir story where we're told who the killer is in the first scene. In 50 First Dates, it's used to give Adam Sandler a hurdle to plowing Drew Barrymore. And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art. It is possible. There is craft there. And where there is craft, there is art.
nonameiguess 3y ago
I don't know what the original actually was, but around post-9/11 derivatives finance boom, physicists and electrical engineers started lamenting that all the smartest people of the current generation were wasting all that brainpower on relatively zero-sum arms races between hedge funds trying to win trades against each other. The one about making people click ads grew out of that after the GFC when software salaries started to boom like finance had earlier in the decade. I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. I recall when I was in college there being huge dilemmas among all the students studying geology whether they should sell out and go work in oil and gas exploration.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. The problem is in my experience (for quite some smart people) not "which job pays so much better (and thus facing a potential dilemma about selling out)", but rather about actually finding a job. The job market does not like very smart people, but rather self-promoters and sycophant: I know quite some really smart people (with a focus on people having degrees in mathematics and physics (often comparable to PhD or post doctoral experience)) who had quite some difficulties actually finding a job in industry, and thus rather had to take the job positions that they could get.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    I've heard a similar thing said about drivers. Those who drive more respectfully and thoughtfully end up in more crashes because the rest is less respectful of them in traffic (and of them crashing). It's an anecdote I just heard from a friend. Maybe there's something similar in the job market where smart people are more self aware that they may take someone elses spot and more respectful and less good self promoters. Because the other set of people don't even think about that they end up getting the spots.
noqc 3y ago
Well, the first is talking about artists, and the second is referring to programmers.
johnchristopher 3y ago
> Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. > I think the original quote is: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. > The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people. - Banksy First time I heard it was in a conversation about how the best students from directing/film making (or was it 3d artists ?) ended up making ads for cars rather than video installations and I am pretty sure it was before 2010. The sentiment is the same though but I cannot ever let pass an occasion to throw in my favourite quote: "when all you have is a hammer...".
- mellosouls 3y ago
  No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked - Howl (EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    > Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too. No, they appeared in very different contexts and Ginsberg goes in a different direction (1955, drugs, jazz, etc.): > I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, [..] while Banksy deals with the then current state of arts and marketing (~2000/2010?). Also, it's not explained in the article how Ginsberg and Hammerbacher ideas relate except for an "en-pasasnt" quote from the person originally inquiring the quote investigator opinion, so the grandparent link doesn't actually point anything out. edit: to summarize: that quote is taken out of context even if it seems to fit
throwaway4aday 3y ago
You could really say this about anything, the only moral to the story is that people have to work to pay the bills and the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that needs doing. I believe this has been true throughout human history. The greatest artists and thinkers throughout history have earned their keep by providing services to the wealthy or teaching paying students (also often wealthy). There are upsides, the artists get to eat but they also have all the benefits of being connected to their employer/patron including time spent practicing their craft. If they were to quit and focus on pure art then they would likely earn far, far less and possibly spend less time making any kind of art commercial or not. It reminds me of this survey that made the front page not long ago about author's that contained this illuminating paragraph: > While 80% of respondents considered themselves to be professional authors, only 35% said they were full-time authors while 53% said they were part-time authors (with the balance being one-book authors or undecided). The primary writing occupation of part-time authors outside of publishing books was professor/academic (8.5%), followed by book illustrator/author (4.2%), editor (2.9%), poet (2.4%), journalist (2%), teacher (2%), and entrepreneur (1.5%). So even people who consider themselves professional authors are unable to work at it full time. It makes sense, there's only so much one person can produce and it's quite difficult to find an audience willing to pay for what you make. This likely holds true across all professions i.e. you have to do the work that they want done and not the work that you want to do. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/93301-author-incomes-post-small-gains.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
- em-bee 3y ago
  the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that needs doing no, the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that someone wants to get done to make a profit. the stuff that actually needs doing is the stuff that would be a benefit for our society.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    "Profit" is just the difference between what people are willing to pay for a service and the full cost of what it takes to provide that service (which itself is defined as how much the different suppliers could be making doing other stuff). Business owners are rewarded for shifting resources away from activities that consumers don't value highly (as evidenced by their willingness to pay for them) to ones that they do. If you feel that businesses are focusing on the wrong things, spend your money differently.
anonzzzies 3y ago
The moral of the story is that a lot of humanity is just working for cash instead of anything useful, interesting, etc for humanity and even themselves. The basic needs and sometimes a bit beyond, still, quite worthless on any scale beyond your few m^2. Depressing, but it seems not improve with us all being better off.

photonthug 3y ago

I wonder if the original author knew they were also paraphrasing, riffing on Ginsberg's "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". Glad to see quoteinvestigator mention that context

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Ads have existed long before clicks on and the most talented artists have worked on them long before the most talented programmers thought about making people click on them.

baliex 3y ago
That's true and doesn't detract from it being a waste of talent
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
The unsaid context of the quote is that programming is among the most lucrative fields (top 3 large employment fields), and most of the money is programming field comes from ads, which is why the best programmers are working on ads. Artists at ad agencies probably never broke even top twenty jobs by salary.
- whartung 3y ago
  Is that true though? Are most people working at Google working on Ad tech, or on the services that the ad tech helps pay for? Now, to be clear, I don't consider GMail "ad tech", even though it is ad supported. I don't see anything wrong with someone like Google want to drive traffic through services that are monetized through advertising. Nor Facebook for that matter. I will complain about lock in, dark patterns, and other nefarious things. But you can have good ad supported services without necessarily having all of the bad things. Those just bump your margin and revenue. So, if you feel that the "good" programmers are working on ad tech and analysis, while the "less good" are working on, say, GMail proper, I'd be curious in how that conclusion was drawn. How many people here work on ad tech directly? (vs, some dual use technology that can be used for ad tech.) I know a lot of people, tangentially, indirectly, "6 degrees of separation" kind of thing, and I don't know any of them being directly involved in ad tech. None of the "lead geeks" I'm familiar with are in the field. The closest it got was a friend of mine who worked on Farmville in its heyday, and that's more a dark pattern addiction game than ad tech.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
com2kid 3y ago
> Ads have existed long before clicks Not really. Advertising is pretty new, modern advertising with targeting market segments didn't exist until around the start of the 20th century[1]. The first ad supported media was in 1838[2]. Behavioral ads targeting individual user's are super new, though I'd argue TikTok and gacha games are orders of magnitude better at using behavioral manipulation than advertisers are. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Barratt [2]https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/ https://qprintgroup.com.au/history-of-print-advertising/

monkeynotes 3y ago

If they are doing advertising then they are art directors, not artists. The most talented artists make art, it's not something they have a choice in. They will suffer poverty to make their art. Talent isn't in the execution in art, it's in the ideas, and tapestry of the artist's life. > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads This is also not true, because those minds aren't intelligent enough to see the folly of their attention. The best minds see past this and do the work they are driven to do, similar to artists.

pimlottc 3y ago
Let’s not over romanticize the starving artist. There are plenty of creative people who could create good, worthy art if they had the means and support to pursue it fully. It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you.
- monkeynotes 3y ago
  The article literally said "the most talented". The top talent artists are certainly making art, and it is a fact they are driven to do it more than anything else. That's the attitude that makes them "the most talented". I am not romanticising it, it's just how it is. > It’s not a moral failing to have a need to make a living, especially if others are relying on you. Exactly. People make choices in what they do, it has nothing to do with talent being taken out of the market, it's always been this way. There have always been more profitable things to do than making art.
bena 3y ago
You do know you can do what you like outside of work, right? You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art. And execution definitely forms part of the talent. We should know that just as well. We all know "the idea guy", the guy who has all the "right" ideas, but just can't seem to actually do the thing required to bring the idea to life. And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts. I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum. It's mostly about execution and the idea actually means very little. The idea of "what if you couldn't make new memories" is the central struggle in two very different movies. In Memento, it's used to tell a detective noir story where we're told who the killer is in the first scene. In 50 First Dates, it's used to give Adam Sandler a hurdle to plowing Drew Barrymore. And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art. It is possible. There is craft there. And where there is craft, there is art.

nonameiguess 3y ago

I don't know what the original actually was, but around post-9/11 derivatives finance boom, physicists and electrical engineers started lamenting that all the smartest people of the current generation were wasting all that brainpower on relatively zero-sum arms races between hedge funds trying to win trades against each other. The one about making people click ads grew out of that after the GFC when software salaries started to boom like finance had earlier in the decade. I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. I recall when I was in college there being huge dilemmas among all the students studying geology whether they should sell out and go work in oil and gas exploration.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I'm sure there was something else earlier that diverted intelligent, talented people into socially unproductive pursuits because it paid better. The problem is in my experience (for quite some smart people) not "which job pays so much better (and thus facing a potential dilemma about selling out)", but rather about actually finding a job. The job market does not like very smart people, but rather self-promoters and sycophant: I know quite some really smart people (with a focus on people having degrees in mathematics and physics (often comparable to PhD or post doctoral experience)) who had quite some difficulties actually finding a job in industry, and thus rather had to take the job positions that they could get.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  I've heard a similar thing said about drivers. Those who drive more respectfully and thoughtfully end up in more crashes because the rest is less respectful of them in traffic (and of them crashing). It's an anecdote I just heard from a friend. Maybe there's something similar in the job market where smart people are more self aware that they may take someone elses spot and more respectful and less good self promoters. Because the other set of people don't even think about that they end up getting the spots.

noqc 3y ago

Well, the first is talking about artists, and the second is referring to programmers.

johnchristopher 3y ago

> Many of the most talented artists of our time don’t do any art — they work in advertising. > I think the original quote is: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. > The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people. - Banksy First time I heard it was in a conversation about how the best students from directing/film making (or was it 3d artists ?) ended up making ads for cars rather than video installations and I am pretty sure it was before 2010. The sentiment is the same though but I cannot ever let pass an occasion to throw in my favourite quote: "when all you have is a hammer...".

mellosouls 3y ago
No, it's a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Banksy and it's specifically about graphic arts, not CS or psychology. Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked - Howl (EDIT: the grandparent link actually points that out)
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  > Nope, the most famous form is Ginsberg; I don't know if he lifted it from somewhere too. No, they appeared in very different contexts and Ginsberg goes in a different direction (1955, drugs, jazz, etc.): > I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, [..] while Banksy deals with the then current state of arts and marketing (~2000/2010?). Also, it's not explained in the article how Ginsberg and Hammerbacher ideas relate except for an "en-pasasnt" quote from the person originally inquiring the quote investigator opinion, so the grandparent link doesn't actually point anything out. edit: to summarize: that quote is taken out of context even if it seems to fit

throwaway4aday 3y ago

You could really say this about anything, the only moral to the story is that people have to work to pay the bills and the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that needs doing. I believe this has been true throughout human history. The greatest artists and thinkers throughout history have earned their keep by providing services to the wealthy or teaching paying students (also often wealthy). There are upsides, the artists get to eat but they also have all the benefits of being connected to their employer/patron including time spent practicing their craft. If they were to quit and focus on pure art then they would likely earn far, far less and possibly spend less time making any kind of art commercial or not. It reminds me of this survey that made the front page not long ago about author's that contained this illuminating paragraph: > While 80% of respondents considered themselves to be professional authors, only 35% said they were full-time authors while 53% said they were part-time authors (with the balance being one-book authors or undecided). The primary writing occupation of part-time authors outside of publishing books was professor/academic (8.5%), followed by book illustrator/author (4.2%), editor (2.9%), poet (2.4%), journalist (2%), teacher (2%), and entrepreneur (1.5%). So even people who consider themselves professional authors are unable to work at it full time. It makes sense, there's only so much one person can produce and it's quite difficult to find an audience willing to pay for what you make. This likely holds true across all professions i.e. you have to do the work that they want done and not the work that you want to do. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/93301-author-incomes-post-small-gains.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

em-bee 3y ago
the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that needs doing no, the work that pays is the unglamorous stuff that someone wants to get done to make a profit. the stuff that actually needs doing is the stuff that would be a benefit for our society.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  "Profit" is just the difference between what people are willing to pay for a service and the full cost of what it takes to provide that service (which itself is defined as how much the different suppliers could be making doing other stuff). Business owners are rewarded for shifting resources away from activities that consumers don't value highly (as evidenced by their willingness to pay for them) to ones that they do. If you feel that businesses are focusing on the wrong things, spend your money differently.

anonzzzies 3y ago

The moral of the story is that a lot of humanity is just working for cash instead of anything useful, interesting, etc for humanity and even themselves. The basic needs and sometimes a bit beyond, still, quite worthless on any scale beyond your few m^2. Depressing, but it seems not improve with us all being better off.