The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”. Clearly he has opinions. But for example in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist. He predicts that some exhibition will be crap and he is right! Which sounds impressive until you notice that he is not measuring his judgement against something objective, but just against his judgement. He decides something will be crap and then he feels crap about it once he sees it. Did others, who did not know that the artist was slow to email back also feel that those exhibitions were mediocre and the others not? Who knows? All we have is this one man’s opinion. Maybe others thought differently.
Even more so in his point 6. He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true. There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art. But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman. But that doesn’t tell you about what it take to be an artist, just only what you value.
Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":
- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.
- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks
Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.
This is a reflexion I made to a friend yesterday: the banana doesn't improve the state of art over Duchamp's Fountain. The real artist, in this case, is the guy who paid 6 millions to eat the banana !
Whenever an absurdly priced work of art makes it to the news, laypeople immediately jump to the explanation of money laundering, but any artist, art purchaser, or even money launderer would know that this is ridiculous. You'd be an idiot to launder their money in the most publicized auction in the year. If you wanted to launder money, it would most likely be through low-profile private sales.
I agree that any individual piece is not guaranteed to be laundering, but the market as a whole is definitely pushed upwards by more factors than people's desire for historical artifacts or decoration.
In any case, in the true upper end of the market, most of these auctions are publicized but the buyers are behind many layers of indirection.
In this specific case we know who bought it Justin Sun. He's a Hong Kong based cyrptocurrency investor who ate it. So it seems like in this case it was more about getting some press, and probably a bit of distraction against some of the allegations against him.
- that buyer didn’t get a real banana. Should have a lifetime supply for that price!
or
- Robert Ryman was exhibited in the Orangerie Museum and compared to Monet (in the equivalent sense).
The bulk of Ryman’s art is a plain white canvas. Not a single dot. Not even a frame. Textured drywall painted with bargain white paint is far more interesting…
It's more about people with a lot of money hoping to sell it for a greater return, while maybe also having shit taste in art. In five years it'll be at an auction and sell to some other person with too much money in hopes of making a profit on it later on.
Nah, it has to do with money laundering, tax evasion, and easy international money transmission. There are tons of interesting tricks you can pull once you have your hands on a small object "worth" hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars whose very illiquid + inefficiently priced sales also affects an entire market of similar objects.
Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.
(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)
I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?
Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.
You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.
Workers are required to follow the orders they are given which are typically specified such that it is the people paying them that get to exercise aesthetic judgement. That is why Notre Dame was restored to a modernized design that is visibly different from its original state.
All my life I have been thinking I should develop good skills in my career. But actually I should have been learning how to make connections and talk to people.
There's no chance of me selling a single banana for that much. But I could be making a multiple what I do now.
It seems to me like a more valid way to describe that work is that, you can predict an artist's long-term success based on their early success.
The first five venues where an artist exhibits isn't wholly based on their social networks, but also tells you how excited the art world is about their work. Since attitudes about the work or the artist are key factors in establishing what their early network is, I don't see how you can conclude that the work and the artist are irrelevant, but the network is relevant.
> It turns out, however, that you can make it by starting from the outside. It’s not easy, but it can work. You have to go around and show your art as much as possible to as many people as possible.
I.e. some portion of “network success strategy” is actually downstream of talent success.
When you say it can "predict an artist's career success", to a 1st approximation, that means it can predict which artists' work will sell for over 10x its current price in a dozen years.
Is it really that easy to make money in the art market?
> But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman.
While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as. That "great" is being commercially successful.
The article is premised around running a non-profit art gallery in a struggling municipality. That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0]. He needed money for his new baby and couldn't afford to lose a job[1]
It is a modern day art gallery. These things are businesses first - to support their own operations and then to help artist support themselves and their work.
So yes, "great" art IS art that sells.
Now, what sells is highly highly subjective, and a very large part of that sales process is making the customer _feel good_ about their purchase. And I think this is where you disagree - that there is a higher, objective reality around good vs great art. And for so much art, there really isn't.
[0] "I started was the inflection point when the revenue, which had been shrinking or muddling for 5 years, began growing again"
[1] "since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all"
> While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as.
I understand that is his definition, but then talk about that. Instead of saying that the exhibition ended up "mediocre" say that "ticket sales were lower than expected" or "sold less paintings than we hoped for", or "didn't bring in anybody".
Because as is he just writes "after weeks of this you end up with something mediocre" and "predict which exhibitions would end up great". That is very vibes based. Did he just not enjoy those exhibitions? Or is it tied to something objective outside of his head? (such as revenue, or crowd size, or critical acclaim) The first is not interesting, the second is.
> That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0].
Or did not do a good job. Base on the very sentence you quote which starts "It helped that the year I started ...". Doesn't give me the impression that even the author believes it is all their doing. Very easily someone could write the same story from a differed perspective "we hired a guy to run the café, but he was way too distracted to keep consistently at it. First he ruffled some feathers with the board then he mellowed out so we kept him around. He pooh-poohed artist who was not as responsive in electronic communication as he would have liked, but we told him softly that is not his decision and to shut it. At the end he was only showing up sporadically and then left to write or something." We only have his world on it and even based on that his track record is less than stelar.
Yes, this is the situation we are left in. I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever. It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.
The biggest failing here is a failing of clear and compelling writing.
> I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever.
Yes, absolutely. I don't know anything about him outside of this article. I assume he is a good employee, or they were mostly happy with him (for the simple reason that they kept employing him). Just wrote that part to illustrate that the same facts from his own pen can be also interpreted in a negative light.
> It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.
On which timeframe tho? Many great artists did not sell well during their lifetime, Van Gogh being the most famous example.
Was Van Gogh a great artist because at some point in the future his works are among the most expensive ones ever sold sold? Or was he a bad artist, that turned great after his death when the market favored him more?
If it is the former, every artist could potentially sell well in the remaining time of human civilization — how far in the future do you draw the line?
If it is the latter then we get the paradoxical situation, that the same work can be both great and bad depending on the observers time reference. So the same painting is bad, until someone "discovers" it and manages ro produce economic hype around it.
As someone with a MA of art who has probably seen more exhibitions than most people on this site (including the last 5 Biennales and the last 3 Documentas) my guess is: great art is great even before it is commercially successful.
Whether it then turns out to be economically successful as well (and when) hinges on many different factors, like the Zeitgeist, pure chance, where it was exhibited or next to what it was exhibited, how the galerist treats the work, how much the artist puts on the market, how the market feels at the time when it is shown etc.
The "greatness" of the work is only a very small factor in the economic success it has, some would even argue it doesn't matter as much as one would think.
But all of that matters on how we define "great". If you are a rich collector that sees art as an investment it is just about the numbers, then great art is only art that you have and that sells for more than you bought it. You'd define it differently depending on who you are: artist, art historian, galerist, lay person, crafts person, journalist, copyright lawyer, restaurator, ..
By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.
That's quite a niche view.
In fact art is an overlap of many different kinds of markets selling to many different kinds of customers - from people buying phone wallpapers online, to tourists buying souvenirs on holiday, to oligarchs laundering money through prestige purchases.
And many others.
A community gallery is going to intersect with a couple of those, but not all of them. Sustainable funding is a goal, but maximising income isn't.
Financial success doesn't sane wash narcissistic entitlement, of which there is plenty outside of the arts.
> By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.
And Vincent van Gogh is not. Or was not a great artist, then he died and become a great artist somehow suddenly after his death. (at least by that definition, which just to make it clear, I don't agree with.)
I have worked a little bit with "artists". Too many of them are caught up in their vision, and apparently incapable of dealing with reality. Too many of them believe that their vision is so, so unique that everyone else should sort out any problems.
There's one guy where I live, whom I tried to help out several times. I would invest lots of effort handling the practical stuff: flyers, text, web site, etc. Little thanks, because it was his due. Then he would have a new idea, change direction, and it was all for nothing.
Part of Gage Art Academy's mission is to create working artists. Students learn about (and struggle with) how to get paid. Stuff like how to price their works, balancing one's own artistic expression with making stuff that sells, how to pull off an exhibit, etc.
> in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist
I strongly assumed that bit was about him predicting whether each exhibition would be "great" from the gallery's perspective - in terms of attendance or revenue or whatever metrics they used. It's not spelled out, but since the whole piece is about him focusing on the business and ops side of things, that bit probably was as well.
> There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art.
I don't think this is particularly true anymore. Most of the canonical artists of the past century were successful during their lifetimes. The ones who weren't either died tragically young (e.g. Basquiat), or didn't care for exposure much at all (e.g. Hilma af Kint).
I agree with this. I'd be curious if you have any hypothesis about why exactly that is? Personally, I can think of three possible reasons but I'm not convinced by any of them:
1. It's became harder to distinguish quality. Artist training has been streamlined, so technical excellence (which is easier to evaluate) isn't novel anymore. So that means determining quality of art now depends on more difficult to evaluate criteria.
2. Art moves faster now, so it's harder to have an influence on the art world (one of the ways an artist becomes famous) posthumously, because by then the art world has probably moved on from the state where the art would have impact.
3. We're just better at discovering artists. E.g., low-barrier to entry for digital distribution means it's easier for artists to find an audience.
As for #1, I think basic art education may be streamlined, but art education in general not necessarily as developed as it was in the past. Sfumato, for example, is a technique that would be difficult to learn in an art school due to how long it takes oil to dry, but straightforward in a master apprentice relationship. Bernini grew up as the son of a marble sculptor when and where that was considered the highest form of art, so it's unlikely that anyone born today could be raised breathing marble dust like how he was.
I think that photography and digital technology killed the importance of technique more than anything else. Even with realist painting, having photographic references allows you to "cheat" your way into good enough results with unrefined skills to the extent that only painting nerds care about the difference, it makes more sense to focus on other things, which like you said are more difficult to evaluate.
Perhaps they are “canonical” because they were successful. Perhaps the canon will look a lot different a century from now when the less commercially successful, obscure greats are finally dusted off.
> He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true
I take it the author means "great" as in "successful".
It is not true in that case either, or at least “successful” is still poorly defined.
It’s defined implicitly in this blog as commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art. Which is a perfectly defensible definition, but should be explicit so people know what argument they’re hearing.
It was clear to me from the article. The very next section is about how being economically sustainable is important if your goal is to maximize the amount of art you can present to a community.
For example, to receive prestigious awards would also fit under "successful," regardless of monetary components. To be recognized after death as one of the Masters would be successful.
Sure, but now you're just circularly defining it back to what was initially pointed out: this is implicitly a very specific definition of greatness, ergo yeah, you replace the word with "successful" and it's implicitly a very specific definition of successful.
I think the author's definition of "best artist" is "artist who made my job easiest". I have no reason to distrust the author about this, but, on the other hand, this information is simply not useful.
> The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”.
A prerequisite to be considered a great artist is that the artist master a "craft" to perfection be it painting, drawing, sculpting, or something complete different like Burial who created one of the most important electronic album using the basic audio-editing software Sound Forge.
I'm actually not denying there's art here, sometimes I "get it" but the art of today has gotten very conceptual and meta.
I see similar issues with music - where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other. Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible. Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Holst ditto.
But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music? Probably John Williams - a film composer primarily. I'm not dissing composers, one of my favourites of all time is Nobuo Uematsu but I am not sure what is art anymore. I wonder if art can only emerge with hindsight. What did it feel like to be in the present when people like Chopin and Liszt were in their heyday while Delacroix and Moreau were painting. Or when Ravel and Debussy were writing impressionistic music alongside Monet and Manet painting
It never was, but it is still important as it always has been.
> There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.
Art is about many things. I agree that a lot of art can be esoteric nowadays, mostly because its in conversation with specific things, so it can feel like an inside joke, or a private conversation you are not privy to. If I make an art piece critiquing an article from The Economist and you never read business news then my piece will be unparseable for you, regardless of quality.
Many art pieces are in response to other art movements, or to niche communities, or to conversations happening in the art world etc. If you jump into a modern art gallery and someone is replying to the art that was in Art Basel Miami, which was a repsonse to internet art, which in itself was a response to figurative early .... and then you go to this art gallery and you cant get a painting because its talking to someone that is not you.
> where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other.
I dont think thats true. There are certainly artists that manage to break new ground while being accesible, while other prime originality over mainstream appeal. That is an artistic choice to be made, in the same way retreading comfortable ground or releasing a Christman Carol album is.
> Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible.
Trying to understand the last supper without knowledge of Christianity would make Da Vinci fairly hard. Monet was a counter culture leader against The Salon in France which prized craft, and execution over more ground breaking attempts like impressionism, so hardly accesible when his entire life was a fight against the culture of the time. Picasso can be called many things, but accesible is not one that comes to mind. Gernika can be considered striking, but cubism, his portraits of women (and their significance), his pottery... there is plenty of his work that needs analysis and is plain ugly on first watch.
> But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music?
There will be plenty. Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer for his lyrics, to give a simple example his song Swimming Pools about the many faces of alcoholism and its raveging effects on the black community is both a popular song as well as really well written narratively. From the 90s you could easily pull Nirvana for offering grunge as an alternative to the hyper corporate, pro capitalism, runaway train that american political and social life was engaged in, while having incredibly catchy songs. If you wanna go further back Bob Dylan and The Beatles are absolute masters of catchy tunes and powerful lyrics.
You said what felt to be in the present with List? Well you had Lisztomania, an absolute uproar of women turning up to see him. This was mocked/replicated by the beatles with Beatlemania. You could argue the Boy band, Justin Bieber phenomenom was that same effect although the musicality, and the corporate interference shows a darker more manufactured side to the art.
And in terms of art you have incredible art of every type right now, never has art been more accesible or easy to produce. What we are missing is search tools, surfacing interesting works and specially people curating what stuff is good from the muck. But if a tree falls in a forest, it still makes sound and rn there are countless artists dropping trees you just need to perk your ears up
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think you've addressed to some degree what I was trying to think around. That art may be difficult to evaluate in its time. Monet may have been a counter culture artist in his time but today he has a somewhat universal appeal. Is that cultural? Are we now primed to like Monet because people have told us to like Monet?
No doubt in his time there were factions, those who pandered to the institution and those who fawned over innovation and originality. I'm sure these cycles occur in every present.
So then what will be remembered from our time? As you say a lot of today's art is esoteric and holding a conversation not all of us are privy to.
I also agree that to some extent we do now have the most art we ever could have. The internet and the creator economy has unlocked creativity in many ways. I recall some discussion the other day about the "hollowing out of the middle" in musical instrument proficiency, and more widely a lot of other skills. Technology and convenience has eradicated a need for many skills at a "mediocre" level but we also have more access to information and learning than ever before.
I refuse to believe that not answering every single email within an hour is a good predictor of anything other than being glued to your phone. I think extending it to a reasonable amount of time, maybe a business day max, works out pretty well. Sometimes people respond really fast because they’re taking regular breaks and other times they don’t respond all evening because they’re putting on their kid’s birthday party. Even at work, sometimes very good colleagues are doing things back-to-back for hours and using short windows to do things like go to the bathroom.
On the other hand maybe this is some art thing I’m too far away from to understand? Maybe really good artists to work with never need more than twenty minutes of deep focus at a time for anything?
I read this as "answer within the hour when preparing an exhibition". If you are in full swing to get an exhibition up and running and this is the time you decide to throw yourself into deep focus work, you are probably hard to work with. I would also assume if some artist told the author "look I know we open on Tuesday, but this Friday we have my kid's birthday so from 4 to 8 I won't be easy to reach", this would probably just be silently dropped from the cou ting of how fast they respond.
On the other hand, without warning going dark for 4 work day hours a few days before exhibition would look terrible if any serious question came up.
So I don't think it's literally responding within the hour, but it comes pretty dang close. You have to keep in mind that being an artist creating art and being an artist setting up an exhibition are basically two different jobs and if you end up doing them in parallel at the same time, that's your problem right there.
I read it like so too. I don’t typically respond to emails immediately unless I have my email application open (which I rarely do as I do enjoy time to do deep work). But in the lead up to a big event there is no way I would go radio silent, unless I’m unconscious in the hospital.
Since when is email expected to be answered immediately??? Anything urgent means a phone call, or a text message. Emails are either for cya reasons (but then my urgency is not necessarily your urgency) or just big stuff needing time - to write, to compose, to think, to analyse. So email answering time is a wrong metric by definition.
How long does setting up an exhibition take, and what kind of hours are you expecting? 4-8 are workday hours?
And what kind of question needs to be answered that fast, but wasn't important enough to be asked several days earlier? My feeling is that there should be very few such questions, few enough that each artist can safely take half a day if they get one.
A day and a half is slow even in software, and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
Sure, software does have bad communicators who change their minds, but revert is relatively easy.
We're talking about half a day, not a day and a half. Or really, less than half a day.
> and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
The wall example was taking place over "weeks". If there is still an urgent question about wall-building a few days out then it sounds like someone waited much too long and that's the real problem, not the extra four hours.
If everyone is there to set up your exhibition at a certain agreed upon time, then you should be engaged and answering any questions immediately if not sooner, regardless of how long it takes to set up the exhibition.
Certain agreed upon time? Yes, of course. You should probably be there for most of it too.
But once you're covering multiple days, no, a single person should not be expected to respond lightning fast the entire time. And the several day scenario is what the comment I replied to talked about.
Unfortunately it's one of those hacks that makes your look like a superhuman. I hate it but obsessively answering emails and messages as soon as possible has given me so many opportunities that it feels like a cheat code. It's nothing reasonable about it but it's just the way things are.
When people complain about this they aren't thinking about how much they love people not answering them. Obviously not everything needs to be answered quickly all the time but the world is full of delays and waiting. Any relief is welcome.
What is the difference if you answer in 10 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours? Are you competing on time of response so if you're fast you're getting the deal?
I can only speak for myself - I produce exec/board materials.
Often a request will go out to several people and I can get ahead by responding first. Sometimes someone will reply to me quickly and the edge I bring is properly digesting their response and then going back quickly to them with questions. Others might accept they have a reply and then wait until they are pulling the paper together to realise they are missing key data.
I don’t read or action all emails instantly, but I am very aware of the ones I need to, or when I am in a period of high focus that needs information fast.
In an ideal world I’d be in an office with all the people I needed around me, all with the same focus and priorities, but that is rarely the case. So to excel at my job I need to make connections fast and respond fast. (Note this isn’t just email, this is just for my communications in general.)
Replying quickly looks like you care and you already know what's going on. It also suggests that you'd be willing to have even more synchronous conversations (phone calls, trips together, etc.)
Doing it during business hours matters more than off hours outside of major deadlines or event prep.
With many organizations, if you want to give this impression and also shut down communications to focus, you need blocks of time outside of business hours where you focus. For example, I know a responsive executive who cannot be reached from 6am-9am every weekday, when most people aren't trying to get hold of him. This is when he writes and reads. Even then, his assistant fields communications so he doesn't seem to have disappeared.
Not saying you should do this or that it's for everybody.
Exec asked for some business information information while traveling.
I replied promptly, sending a link to a webpage, within the proper process for secure data sharing according to company policy. This required exec to visit our internal website to view the information.
A teammate emailed the information directly, violating policy and good data stewardship.
CEO replied to teammate's email with a big group thank you for "emailing the information quickly".
My experience is the complete opposite. It’s a weak point like a supermarket that is still open at 11 pm. Do I need it? No, but I’ll take the service anyway since it’s free.
How is it a weak point for a supermarket to be open at 11? 24 hour supermarkets are fantastic and have saved my bottom many a time.
Do I _need_ it? No, I don't _need_ much of anything other than air to breathe and a bit of food in my belly. Most people don't just settle for that though.
This is an uncharitable take. Who said anything about an interruption every 20 minutes? We're talking about an artist doing an exhibition at a gallery, by any measure, this is a pretty significant collaboration that is in the artist's best interest and not something their getting spammed with dozens of a times a day.
If you read and digest the article, the point is not to create a litmus test based on time-to-response, it's to recognize there are a lot of people to talk a big game but are unserious about achieving shared goals.
If an artist is not responsive because they are so serious about their creative process that they don't have time to respond to a gallery doing an exhibition than maybe that's the right thing for what they are serious about, but it does jack shit for the gallery staffer who is serious about creating an exhibition.
Are you a professional [earning most of your money through your art]? Which country do you live in please?
I've only seen the self-curation from community groups. I'm all for collectives but I'm pretty sure the professional artists I know would say it gives off budget/desperate vibes and so it's something you can't afford to do if you aspire to 'make it [big]'.
{I express myself through overuse of parentheses and through runon sentences...}
i did take some issue with the way that point was phrased as well.
but, i took it a little more broadly than it was actually specified: people who are not great about communicating or make it hard for you to work with them at the outset will probably continue to be like that throughout the entirety of your working relationship.
i watch some videos on the Tested youtube channel, where the host is Adam Savage, who was one of the hosts/creators of the MythBusters tv show, and he often talks about this point, and how he learned it working with Jamie Hyneman early on in his career where they would take clients, and Jamie explained this principal.
You’re trying to systematise something that is more like basic human nature. It’s like trying to explain why people like attractive people from a utilitarian perspective.
In the real world I just prefer to interact with people who prioritise me over other things and most people are the same.
Yet some artists do believe that it's morally wrong that producing whatever they deem as good art isn't guaranteed to be self-supporting. They shouldn't ultimately have to answer to anyone else's opinion to earn a living. Which is highly entitled, and non-evolutionary.
He didn't mention a timescale. Maybe it's a difference between 4 hours and 1 day? I would agree that if someone takes longer than a day to respond, then it's going to be hard to work with this person. 4 hours is fine.
Becoming recognized as a good artist depends a great deal on being an effective communicator about one's work. It's sort of self-selecting but it is part of the job.
All people are not alike. Thankfully. Refer Law of Requisite Variety. Some people live to please.
Once you understand people are very different, the whole story turns into setting teams up such that the right people are in the right role. Ofcourse this is hard to pull off, so there is always drama in any group.
They have EA’s that can go through their inboxes for them and highlight what actually needs a response. Hell they probably draft responses for them too
This is not just some art thing. People note it in every field. It's not the only predictor; the author of Chrome reportedly did most of it offline IIRC. But it's a real phenomenon that is robust in the face of the concerns you're raising. There is a wide range of email responsiveness -- even among people who are going to the bathroom and putting on birthday parties and doing focus work -- and it is a helpful predictor.
I enjoyed reading this, but I felt that 90% of this person’s experience was simply the result of being a real contributor in an organization with non-existent expectations/completely un-optimized state/no other real contributors.
In other words it’s easy to make a difference as a high performer in a low performance organization.
Again not detracting from this persons achievements, I just don’t think these most of these observations apply in high performIng organizations
I got a similar sense, especially the section where they talked about needing to build trust before trying to change things. I do volunteer photography, and feel the same way as this article any time I do a shoot for a small organization that has never gotten good photos for their business before. It's super rewarding, but a completely different thing than my dayjob managing a solid team of engineers.
There are a lot more low performing organizations than high performing ones. Even organizations usually perceived as high performing tend to have a few high performing teams surrounded by oceans of mediocrity.
And if you're this kind of person you can absolutely crush it at certain types of non-profits and NGOs that attract people with a lot of ideas but no work ethic.
At least if you're okay with being the only person with any ambition. Personally I have to flee from those environments.
It’s not necessarily more easy to be great in a low performance organisation. Often these organisations are low performant for a reason. The worst one egos, drama and politics
If you don't have access to high performing institutions for whatever reason, this is how you can leverage a position in a low performing institution to achieve a lot of success.
> In other words it’s easy to make a difference as a high performer in a low performance organization.
And yet, the big takeaway for me is that to be a high performer it isn’t enough to A) know what needs to be done, or B) be able to do it well. The key is C) figuring out the incentive landscape.
His story of carving out his own job only to find he had no support from the board is what I’ve tried before. In my low performing organization, I thought I could be a high performer by knowing what needed to be done and doing it well. Everybody I directly worked with loved me and thought I was highly effective, but I never made any lasting change like this author. I didn’t understand the need to skip way up the levels until I was already burnt out.
Thanks for sharing. Henrik Karlsson is one of my favourite writers on the internet at the moment. His other piece called "Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process" [1] left such a big impression on me and I return to it frequently, highly recommend.
He’s a struggling writer who moved to a barren island where homeschooling his kid isn’t illegal like it is in mainland Sweden. He did this so he and his family could pursue a more meaningful life and he could make a go of it as a writer.
If you love his content please consider chipping in to his substack to help keep these great pieces coming out instead of linking the archive. It’s why he was working at the gallery in the first place instead of writing full time.
An alternative, more nuanced, realistic version of "follow your passion" ? Follow your passion might have ended up in "follow your vision", "vision" used here as the article defines it. The article makes a case for "follow your context", a more workable version of the popular adage. Thought provoking !
Wow, that was a great essay. It describes the process I've been using for the past 10 years to design a happy life. I had no words to describe it in a good way, but now I have.
The article itself is fantastic. However, this is a great example of what makes catnip for HN -
1) Use scientific terms (e.g. vector fields, waves resonance)
2) Cite tech influencers (e.g. Sholto Douglas, Tyler Cowen)
3) Make the subject an abstract novel field that most developers or tech folk don't really pay attention and use #1 and #2 to make it relevant
Honestly, the entire blog feels that way: referencing the same old tropes and personalities in a slightly novel context. A sort of a comfort read for the web2.0 nostalgia crowd.
I guess this approach worked, since it allowed the author to go on writing full time in Denmark (HCoL), which is an achievement these days.
People here in the comments seem to focus on whether it is possible to predict an artist's success based on secondary "civic" virtues, and criticize the author for having subjective criteria for what "success" means.
I'd argue that independently of how you measure success, all other things being equal, having diligence and other civic virtues will get you further, on average.
That said, the most interesting lessons are in the first and sixth (the 2nd 6th, the actual 6th) item: How to do a better/more widely scoped job than what you got hired for (by understanding how interests, incentives and responsibilities align in an org) and the fact that in most places, most people are not serious (meaning they tend to not go deeper, look at the big picture, etc.).
I think the point is more that there are indicators that a person is in conflict with their own mission. Struggles to respond, complains, focuses on the immaterial. I think OP is completely right. When a person is aligned, they get out of their own way, this people are easy to differentiate. One produces mediocre work, the other produces great stuff. I also agree it’s within the power of the individual to be either.
I like this view. Still, this seems a way of reasoning about that artist’s success at that particular gallery - perhaps the artist is busy with art projects that are better aligned with them.
Quite likely, though I think we are talking about different things. OP and I are talking to shared alignment, where they came together to sell art for mutual benefit and how to spot good partners to work with. Sure if a partner isn’t good for you, they might have other places where they work well, but I think that’s out of scope to the article IMO.
> If we want to make the world a better place, we can’t just think about the lofty stuff: we have to get our hands dirty and make sure the economic engine works.
This seems a very narrow if not conformist view of art.
Artists doing graffiti, participating in hobby groups, state funded projects, discovered by later generations, etc - they don’t care about making viewers feel good about funding; and yet their art can very much make the world a better place.
It is perhaps a narrow view, but not an incorrect one.
You mention state funded projects, but the funding has to come from somewhere else. What the author is saying is this: it takes money to run a gallery (or a museum, for that matter), therefore even if it is not the primary objective, we should strive to keep the money flowing so that we can make have better galleries/museums.
Galleries are necessarily behind the curve because they're businesses and have to stay afloat. You typically don't go to a gallery to see something new, but to see the works of an already established artist.
Meanwhile interesting, innovative art happens outside of galleries, but you have to look for it, as there's an oversupply of aspiring artists.
Bottom line is you can't base the whole art scene on the opinions of art galleries, as they play it safe and art is strictly about the opposite.
Actually the money doesn’t have to come from anywhere, that’s my point. If we cut all state funding - I’m sure artists would continue making art, as they did for millenia. We encourage art with state funding because we consider it beneficial to the society[1].
The “keep the money flowing” approach distracts from making art and leads to making art that sells well. Do we really want that to dominate galleries/museums?
[1]: “American taxpayers concur, with 55% supporting increasing federal investment in the arts, 57% supporting state government funding for the arts and 58% supporting local government funding for the arts” https://www.delawareartsalliance.org/government-funding-arts...
The article glosses over the bosses and board members, but it feels that’s where the story is. Often art institutions are not optimized to make money for the organization, but rather to employ specific people or make specific people visible in a desired way. Hence the workshops and fundraisers. I suspect that’s why the boss, eventually becomes just a „first boss”.
> But if someone else isn’t measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people who have already decided.
This reminded me of the part in Good to Great where one company's success was attributed to setting up a steel factory in a agriculture-heavy area, where the residents were farmers who were already predisposed to working hard.
I'm curious if, on the flip side, anyone has any strategies for "convincing someone to measure up" as the author puts it.
Nice to read. I didn't guess that the article would be so fun to read and insightful. I wouldn't have even read it if it wasn't ranked 1 in hackernews.
Some years ago I decided that, at some point in my life, I would try and involve myself with a gallery or museum.
As with all things, it depends, but it seems to me that in such places you can find some of the most authentic and driven people out there. And it's probably quite fun to work with them.
Artists are like engineers. The types of decisions the two groups make are wildly different, but each group makes decisions for a living and focuses the rest of their time on craftsmanship.
Also like engineers, the best make far better decisions, or are far better craftsmen, or both.
I have found the most authentic folks are the low-key ones that have a booth at an arts festival or some other show.
I've been to galleries, and thought the vibe was really un-authentic. maybe I've been to the dysfunctional ones. Maybe that it is that galleries are more about something else than the art, more meta. (and they sold art not like this community gallery)
I don't get what you're trying to say. Most art galleries are businesses. They exhibits artists and artworks that sell. There is nothing un-authentic or dysfunctional about it; to put it more precisely, dysfunctional art galleries won't last very long, just like any other business that offers products that aren't in demand and don't attract buyers.
Are you saying that galleries usually don't last very long and tend to be commercial failures?
Talking to a guy in an arts festival booth, the conversation is usually about the art.
Talking to a guy in a gallery (in the US, that sells art for other people), the conversation is usually about me (sizing up a sales prospect).
Note that galleries I'm talking about are for-profit - selling people's artwork and paying the rent. If you do talk to the artist, it is some artist-attends gathering and there are a lot of other people talking to the frazzled artist too.
the gallery in the article seems different, it is a community coop and might have a different dynamic.
Curious they say in the first paragraph, "didn’t speak the language" but then seemingly very quickly started attending board meetings and taking notes? With no further mention of learning Danish. Seems like a notable achievement!
How dare someone not respond to the email of a gallery coffee director within the hour! Obviously that makes them a bad artist. I like how the OP has anointed himself as the judge of other's work but instead of actually judging the work itself based on its own merits (which he can't be bothered to do) he instead relies on personal attacks and poor measurements like how fast someone responds to an email from him.
Maybe these artists were put out by the odd relationship of corresponding with the guy who runs the coffee stand for their show? He strikes me as the kind of person who needs to be involved in everything, but doesn't really care about anything. Huge ego and constantly judging everyone around him. He would make an excellent manager in corporate america.
The insights on how the best artists resemble top startup founders hit home. It's amazing how professionalism and a relentless drive to improve can make someone a joy to work with—and how the opposite traits predict mediocrity and headaches.
He set them up for success, and then left. With no mention of choosing a successor! Without that, they will fall back into bad decisions in months and blow through their 'war chest' the first year.
My wife reorganized the after-school program for our elementary school, got it on an upward trajectory, got grants and some money in the bank to pay for exceptional bills. And left, without choosing a successor.
Of course, the staff blew through the savings instantly, because they didn't know the budget or the purpose of having some margin for safety. Had to raise rates and reduce hours and all the bad things, just to keep going. All the time thinking it wasn't their fault, just the bad old world that didn't want to give them money for free to blow on their whims.
I think the biggest win for this job was not the six points identified, but the author gained their boss's trust; got project alignment to the organization's mission, and earned more autonomy.
In essence the task-oriented leading was switched to area-of-responsibility leading. That is, instead of giving a list of tasks to complete by the author, an AoR was given, and all tasks initially verified, then allowed to move forward as the author saw it fit. It is task-oriented vs. AoR-Oriented leadership.
Basically, in large part this worked because of the job context and the leadership of the boss.
This essai reminds me of someone a few years back telling me that Artists and Startups where very similar.
- "What ?" I replied confused.
- "Yes ! We work for nothing, crafting a unique skills and hoping to find Product Market Fit. Of either an original Software or an special Sculpture.
The economic is for both an economic of big incertinity.
Galleries bet on a few Artists among many just like YCombinator bets on a few startups every years hoping for the best.
Lovely article! It induced an unexpected feeling of nostalgia for me personally as I previously worked at an large public art gallery. I was part of the marketing team and my role focused mostly on the digital side: web updates and digital signage throughout the space. The description of great artists in the article resonated with me; the best ones where those that truly did it for the art and were surprisingly humble.
That's not to say that all amateur artists are self-centered; I met plenty of up and coming artists that felt like wizened "old souls" without ego, and playful at heart. I think they were just great artists in the making!
Even though it wasn't the most high paying job, it was really fun being part of the visual art heartbeat in a city.
I went into this article with a lot of skepticism, but the author has some excellent points. Here's one, as an example.
On dealing with people (in his case, artists): "if...someone isn't measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people [who do]." I.e., don't waste your time on people who are "demanding or confused or slow at answering their email".
i was a security guard at an art museum for a long time. it was the only job i could find after being laid off from my software gig. thanks for sharing
How many deep insights can you really gain on an entire industry by working in it for 2 years? And starting off in a separate industry which just happens to be located within the other?
>So instead of selling coffee, I looked into how we could streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it.
So he persuaded unpaid volunteers to do the work he was being paid to do?
I grew up immersed in the art world—my father is an artist, and my sister is a curator working on exhibitions for institutions like MoMA and the Reina Sofia Museum, and linked to a known dead artist. Based on my lifelong experience in this environment, here are my thoughts:
Art as a Business: Selling art is predominantly a business, and, frankly, quality often doesn't play the leading role. Market dynamics, branding, and influence have a much stronger impact on an artist’s commercial success. Many buyers lack a refined taste for art but are guided by curators, galleries, or social trends to invest in one artist over another. This is particularly true outside the realm of blue-chip artists like Picasso, van Gogh, or Bacon, where established market signals guide decisions.
Theory and Practice: while I love the theoretical discussions around art (e.g. Walter Benjamin) I find these ideas largely irrelevant to the business side of the art market. Theory has its place in academia and criticism, but it often feels disconnected from the pragmatic realities of selling and promoting art.
If you're interested in understanding how the art world operates, I highly recommend visiting Art Basel or similar art fairs. These events showcase the intersection of commerce, curation, and culture, providing a fascinating snapshot of the art market's priorities and trends. I personally did my own art intervention with technology and received known artists who wanted to participated in the experiment and beyond the project originality it would not work in other contexts without some validation (being in a space in Wynwood [1]).
The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”. Clearly he has opinions. But for example in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist. He predicts that some exhibition will be crap and he is right! Which sounds impressive until you notice that he is not measuring his judgement against something objective, but just against his judgement. He decides something will be crap and then he feels crap about it once he sees it. Did others, who did not know that the artist was slow to email back also feel that those exhibitions were mediocre and the others not? Who knows? All we have is this one man’s opinion. Maybe others thought differently.
Even more so in his point 6. He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true. There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art. But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman. But that doesn’t tell you about what it take to be an artist, just only what you value.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/physicist-shows-that-to-b...
Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":
- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.
- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks
Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.
I guess this is why a sucessful genius can tape a banana to a wall while a run of the mill worker can only restore Notre Dame to its original state.
This is a reflexion I made to a friend yesterday: the banana doesn't improve the state of art over Duchamp's Fountain. The real artist, in this case, is the guy who paid 6 millions to eat the banana !
The guy that bought it is not an artist, he was just trying to distract from some good-old-fashioned corruption: https://popular.info/p/a-chinese-national-charged-with-fraud
Based on the coverage of his purchase it seems like he succeeded.
A con artist is a kind of artist, right?
They are artists all the way down.
Now someone must eat the artist who ate the banana, for several million dollars.
An artist has to tape them to a wall first.
I'll do it. But not for less than $12mm
I am an artist. I would do it for the sake of art (and $10mil)
...but who will be left holding the (body)bag?
Money laundering is probably what makes a banana taped to a wall successful.
No that is more about money laundering
Whenever an absurdly priced work of art makes it to the news, laypeople immediately jump to the explanation of money laundering, but any artist, art purchaser, or even money launderer would know that this is ridiculous. You'd be an idiot to launder their money in the most publicized auction in the year. If you wanted to launder money, it would most likely be through low-profile private sales.
I agree that any individual piece is not guaranteed to be laundering, but the market as a whole is definitely pushed upwards by more factors than people's desire for historical artifacts or decoration.
In any case, in the true upper end of the market, most of these auctions are publicized but the buyers are behind many layers of indirection.
In this specific case we know who bought it Justin Sun. He's a Hong Kong based cyrptocurrency investor who ate it. So it seems like in this case it was more about getting some press, and probably a bit of distraction against some of the allegations against him.
Nope he didn’t eat it. He got a digital token with instructions on how to tape his own banana to the wall.
Before someone thinks I’m not serious - I am. That was out in the news today.
Yeah, not sure what is worse.
- that buyer didn’t get a real banana. Should have a lifetime supply for that price!
or
- Robert Ryman was exhibited in the Orangerie Museum and compared to Monet (in the equivalent sense).
The bulk of Ryman’s art is a plain white canvas. Not a single dot. Not even a frame. Textured drywall painted with bargain white paint is far more interesting…
My drywall contractor should be a billionaire…
It's more about people with a lot of money hoping to sell it for a greater return, while maybe also having shit taste in art. In five years it'll be at an auction and sell to some other person with too much money in hopes of making a profit on it later on.
Nah, it has to do with money laundering, tax evasion, and easy international money transmission. There are tons of interesting tricks you can pull once you have your hands on a small object "worth" hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars whose very illiquid + inefficiently priced sales also affects an entire market of similar objects.
The guy who bought it, Justin Sun, ate it. So unless it's going to get really meta (and stinky) he's not going to resell it.
The thing being bought by him was not a specific physical banana, so he can resell what was sold just fine if he wants to.
Net worth $1.6B. So eating a $6M banana is a PR stunt.
Edit: Also doesn't mean it can't be resold as that banana gets replaced x number of days.
That would be a piece of art.
let's buy that argument for discussion's sake, that doesn't contradict with the notion that networking is important.
I wasn't trying to contradict that
How does that work exactly?
Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.
(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)
that isn't money laundering though.
I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?
Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.
You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.
Workers are required to follow the orders they are given which are typically specified such that it is the people paying them that get to exercise aesthetic judgement. That is why Notre Dame was restored to a modernized design that is visibly different from its original state.
Interesting...the several articles I've read note how closely it has remained to the original design. What aspects are modernised?
The world is pretty disappointing in that way.
All my life I have been thinking I should develop good skills in my career. But actually I should have been learning how to make connections and talk to people.
There's no chance of me selling a single banana for that much. But I could be making a multiple what I do now.
Why not do both?
It seems to me like a more valid way to describe that work is that, you can predict an artist's long-term success based on their early success.
The first five venues where an artist exhibits isn't wholly based on their social networks, but also tells you how excited the art world is about their work. Since attitudes about the work or the artist are key factors in establishing what their early network is, I don't see how you can conclude that the work and the artist are irrelevant, but the network is relevant.
> It turns out, however, that you can make it by starting from the outside. It’s not easy, but it can work. You have to go around and show your art as much as possible to as many people as possible.
I.e. some portion of “network success strategy” is actually downstream of talent success.
Hold up. This is very intriguing.
When you say it can "predict an artist's career success", to a 1st approximation, that means it can predict which artists' work will sell for over 10x its current price in a dozen years.
Is it really that easy to make money in the art market?
This is great to think about. Glad I ran across this comment.
Or is it that performance creates a network?
sounds like startups founding and software engineers career
> But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman.
While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as. That "great" is being commercially successful.
The article is premised around running a non-profit art gallery in a struggling municipality. That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0]. He needed money for his new baby and couldn't afford to lose a job[1]
It is a modern day art gallery. These things are businesses first - to support their own operations and then to help artist support themselves and their work.
So yes, "great" art IS art that sells.
Now, what sells is highly highly subjective, and a very large part of that sales process is making the customer _feel good_ about their purchase. And I think this is where you disagree - that there is a higher, objective reality around good vs great art. And for so much art, there really isn't.
[0] "I started was the inflection point when the revenue, which had been shrinking or muddling for 5 years, began growing again"
[1] "since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all"
> While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as.
I understand that is his definition, but then talk about that. Instead of saying that the exhibition ended up "mediocre" say that "ticket sales were lower than expected" or "sold less paintings than we hoped for", or "didn't bring in anybody".
Because as is he just writes "after weeks of this you end up with something mediocre" and "predict which exhibitions would end up great". That is very vibes based. Did he just not enjoy those exhibitions? Or is it tied to something objective outside of his head? (such as revenue, or crowd size, or critical acclaim) The first is not interesting, the second is.
> That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0].
Or did not do a good job. Base on the very sentence you quote which starts "It helped that the year I started ...". Doesn't give me the impression that even the author believes it is all their doing. Very easily someone could write the same story from a differed perspective "we hired a guy to run the café, but he was way too distracted to keep consistently at it. First he ruffled some feathers with the board then he mellowed out so we kept him around. He pooh-poohed artist who was not as responsive in electronic communication as he would have liked, but we told him softly that is not his decision and to shut it. At the end he was only showing up sporadically and then left to write or something." We only have his world on it and even based on that his track record is less than stelar.
Yes, this is the situation we are left in. I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever. It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.
The biggest failing here is a failing of clear and compelling writing.
> I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever.
Yes, absolutely. I don't know anything about him outside of this article. I assume he is a good employee, or they were mostly happy with him (for the simple reason that they kept employing him). Just wrote that part to illustrate that the same facts from his own pen can be also interpreted in a negative light.
> It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.
I totally agree with that.
On which timeframe tho? Many great artists did not sell well during their lifetime, Van Gogh being the most famous example.
Was Van Gogh a great artist because at some point in the future his works are among the most expensive ones ever sold sold? Or was he a bad artist, that turned great after his death when the market favored him more?
If it is the former, every artist could potentially sell well in the remaining time of human civilization — how far in the future do you draw the line?
If it is the latter then we get the paradoxical situation, that the same work can be both great and bad depending on the observers time reference. So the same painting is bad, until someone "discovers" it and manages ro produce economic hype around it.
As someone with a MA of art who has probably seen more exhibitions than most people on this site (including the last 5 Biennales and the last 3 Documentas) my guess is: great art is great even before it is commercially successful.
Whether it then turns out to be economically successful as well (and when) hinges on many different factors, like the Zeitgeist, pure chance, where it was exhibited or next to what it was exhibited, how the galerist treats the work, how much the artist puts on the market, how the market feels at the time when it is shown etc.
The "greatness" of the work is only a very small factor in the economic success it has, some would even argue it doesn't matter as much as one would think.
But all of that matters on how we define "great". If you are a rich collector that sees art as an investment it is just about the numbers, then great art is only art that you have and that sells for more than you bought it. You'd define it differently depending on who you are: artist, art historian, galerist, lay person, crafts person, journalist, copyright lawyer, restaurator, ..
By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.
That's quite a niche view.
In fact art is an overlap of many different kinds of markets selling to many different kinds of customers - from people buying phone wallpapers online, to tourists buying souvenirs on holiday, to oligarchs laundering money through prestige purchases.
And many others.
A community gallery is going to intersect with a couple of those, but not all of them. Sustainable funding is a goal, but maximising income isn't.
Financial success doesn't sane wash narcissistic entitlement, of which there is plenty outside of the arts.
> By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.
And Vincent van Gogh is not. Or was not a great artist, then he died and become a great artist somehow suddenly after his death. (at least by that definition, which just to make it clear, I don't agree with.)
I'm fine with "remembered somehow" as another useful definition for "a great artist".
More cynically: van Gogh was only successfully monetized posthumously.
I have worked a little bit with "artists". Too many of them are caught up in their vision, and apparently incapable of dealing with reality. Too many of them believe that their vision is so, so unique that everyone else should sort out any problems.
There's one guy where I live, whom I tried to help out several times. I would invest lots of effort handling the practical stuff: flyers, text, web site, etc. Little thanks, because it was his due. Then he would have a new idea, change direction, and it was all for nothing.
True.
Part of Gage Art Academy's mission is to create working artists. Students learn about (and struggle with) how to get paid. Stuff like how to price their works, balancing one's own artistic expression with making stuff that sells, how to pull off an exhibit, etc.
https://gageacademy.org/
> in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist
I strongly assumed that bit was about him predicting whether each exhibition would be "great" from the gallery's perspective - in terms of attendance or revenue or whatever metrics they used. It's not spelled out, but since the whole piece is about him focusing on the business and ops side of things, that bit probably was as well.
> There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art.
I don't think this is particularly true anymore. Most of the canonical artists of the past century were successful during their lifetimes. The ones who weren't either died tragically young (e.g. Basquiat), or didn't care for exposure much at all (e.g. Hilma af Kint).
I agree with this. I'd be curious if you have any hypothesis about why exactly that is? Personally, I can think of three possible reasons but I'm not convinced by any of them:
1. It's became harder to distinguish quality. Artist training has been streamlined, so technical excellence (which is easier to evaluate) isn't novel anymore. So that means determining quality of art now depends on more difficult to evaluate criteria.
2. Art moves faster now, so it's harder to have an influence on the art world (one of the ways an artist becomes famous) posthumously, because by then the art world has probably moved on from the state where the art would have impact.
3. We're just better at discovering artists. E.g., low-barrier to entry for digital distribution means it's easier for artists to find an audience.
Any thoughts?
I think #2 and #3 are definitely factors.
As for #1, I think basic art education may be streamlined, but art education in general not necessarily as developed as it was in the past. Sfumato, for example, is a technique that would be difficult to learn in an art school due to how long it takes oil to dry, but straightforward in a master apprentice relationship. Bernini grew up as the son of a marble sculptor when and where that was considered the highest form of art, so it's unlikely that anyone born today could be raised breathing marble dust like how he was.
I think that photography and digital technology killed the importance of technique more than anything else. Even with realist painting, having photographic references allows you to "cheat" your way into good enough results with unrefined skills to the extent that only painting nerds care about the difference, it makes more sense to focus on other things, which like you said are more difficult to evaluate.
Perhaps they are “canonical” because they were successful. Perhaps the canon will look a lot different a century from now when the less commercially successful, obscure greats are finally dusted off.
> He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true
I take it the author means "great" as in "successful".
It is not true in that case either, or at least “successful” is still poorly defined.
It’s defined implicitly in this blog as commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art. Which is a perfectly defensible definition, but should be explicit so people know what argument they’re hearing.
It was clear to me from the article. The very next section is about how being economically sustainable is important if your goal is to maximize the amount of art you can present to a community.
> commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art
That's what I meant with successful. Not sure what other variations there would be, though I'm not a native speaker.
For example, to receive prestigious awards would also fit under "successful," regardless of monetary components. To be recognized after death as one of the Masters would be successful.
The author is talking about the artistry being aligned with market forces in the paragraph preceding the quote.
I don't really see how either of those definitions fit in that context.
Sure, but now you're just circularly defining it back to what was initially pointed out: this is implicitly a very specific definition of greatness, ergo yeah, you replace the word with "successful" and it's implicitly a very specific definition of successful.
I think the author's definition of "best artist" is "artist who made my job easiest". I have no reason to distrust the author about this, but, on the other hand, this information is simply not useful.
I have worked for an artist for about 20 years. He releases a print every week, I could not tell you which one is going to sell well or not.
> The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”.
A prerequisite to be considered a great artist is that the artist master a "craft" to perfection be it painting, drawing, sculpting, or something complete different like Burial who created one of the most important electronic album using the basic audio-editing software Sound Forge.
Is art really about craft anymore?
There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.
What is the craft in a dirty bath tub or a robot endlessly sweeping liquid?
Better yet what's the craft in a white canvas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invisible_artworks
I'm actually not denying there's art here, sometimes I "get it" but the art of today has gotten very conceptual and meta.
I see similar issues with music - where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other. Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible. Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Holst ditto.
But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music? Probably John Williams - a film composer primarily. I'm not dissing composers, one of my favourites of all time is Nobuo Uematsu but I am not sure what is art anymore. I wonder if art can only emerge with hindsight. What did it feel like to be in the present when people like Chopin and Liszt were in their heyday while Delacroix and Moreau were painting. Or when Ravel and Debussy were writing impressionistic music alongside Monet and Manet painting
> Is art really about craft anymore?
It never was, but it is still important as it always has been.
> There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.
Art is about many things. I agree that a lot of art can be esoteric nowadays, mostly because its in conversation with specific things, so it can feel like an inside joke, or a private conversation you are not privy to. If I make an art piece critiquing an article from The Economist and you never read business news then my piece will be unparseable for you, regardless of quality.
Many art pieces are in response to other art movements, or to niche communities, or to conversations happening in the art world etc. If you jump into a modern art gallery and someone is replying to the art that was in Art Basel Miami, which was a repsonse to internet art, which in itself was a response to figurative early .... and then you go to this art gallery and you cant get a painting because its talking to someone that is not you.
> where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other.
I dont think thats true. There are certainly artists that manage to break new ground while being accesible, while other prime originality over mainstream appeal. That is an artistic choice to be made, in the same way retreading comfortable ground or releasing a Christman Carol album is.
> Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible.
Trying to understand the last supper without knowledge of Christianity would make Da Vinci fairly hard. Monet was a counter culture leader against The Salon in France which prized craft, and execution over more ground breaking attempts like impressionism, so hardly accesible when his entire life was a fight against the culture of the time. Picasso can be called many things, but accesible is not one that comes to mind. Gernika can be considered striking, but cubism, his portraits of women (and their significance), his pottery... there is plenty of his work that needs analysis and is plain ugly on first watch.
> But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music?
There will be plenty. Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer for his lyrics, to give a simple example his song Swimming Pools about the many faces of alcoholism and its raveging effects on the black community is both a popular song as well as really well written narratively. From the 90s you could easily pull Nirvana for offering grunge as an alternative to the hyper corporate, pro capitalism, runaway train that american political and social life was engaged in, while having incredibly catchy songs. If you wanna go further back Bob Dylan and The Beatles are absolute masters of catchy tunes and powerful lyrics.
You said what felt to be in the present with List? Well you had Lisztomania, an absolute uproar of women turning up to see him. This was mocked/replicated by the beatles with Beatlemania. You could argue the Boy band, Justin Bieber phenomenom was that same effect although the musicality, and the corporate interference shows a darker more manufactured side to the art.
And in terms of art you have incredible art of every type right now, never has art been more accesible or easy to produce. What we are missing is search tools, surfacing interesting works and specially people curating what stuff is good from the muck. But if a tree falls in a forest, it still makes sound and rn there are countless artists dropping trees you just need to perk your ears up
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think you've addressed to some degree what I was trying to think around. That art may be difficult to evaluate in its time. Monet may have been a counter culture artist in his time but today he has a somewhat universal appeal. Is that cultural? Are we now primed to like Monet because people have told us to like Monet?
No doubt in his time there were factions, those who pandered to the institution and those who fawned over innovation and originality. I'm sure these cycles occur in every present.
So then what will be remembered from our time? As you say a lot of today's art is esoteric and holding a conversation not all of us are privy to.
I also agree that to some extent we do now have the most art we ever could have. The internet and the creator economy has unlocked creativity in many ways. I recall some discussion the other day about the "hollowing out of the middle" in musical instrument proficiency, and more widely a lot of other skills. Technology and convenience has eradicated a need for many skills at a "mediocre" level but we also have more access to information and learning than ever before.
I refuse to believe that not answering every single email within an hour is a good predictor of anything other than being glued to your phone. I think extending it to a reasonable amount of time, maybe a business day max, works out pretty well. Sometimes people respond really fast because they’re taking regular breaks and other times they don’t respond all evening because they’re putting on their kid’s birthday party. Even at work, sometimes very good colleagues are doing things back-to-back for hours and using short windows to do things like go to the bathroom.
On the other hand maybe this is some art thing I’m too far away from to understand? Maybe really good artists to work with never need more than twenty minutes of deep focus at a time for anything?
I read this as "answer within the hour when preparing an exhibition". If you are in full swing to get an exhibition up and running and this is the time you decide to throw yourself into deep focus work, you are probably hard to work with. I would also assume if some artist told the author "look I know we open on Tuesday, but this Friday we have my kid's birthday so from 4 to 8 I won't be easy to reach", this would probably just be silently dropped from the cou ting of how fast they respond.
On the other hand, without warning going dark for 4 work day hours a few days before exhibition would look terrible if any serious question came up.
So I don't think it's literally responding within the hour, but it comes pretty dang close. You have to keep in mind that being an artist creating art and being an artist setting up an exhibition are basically two different jobs and if you end up doing them in parallel at the same time, that's your problem right there.
I read it like so too. I don’t typically respond to emails immediately unless I have my email application open (which I rarely do as I do enjoy time to do deep work). But in the lead up to a big event there is no way I would go radio silent, unless I’m unconscious in the hospital.
Since when is email expected to be answered immediately??? Anything urgent means a phone call, or a text message. Emails are either for cya reasons (but then my urgency is not necessarily your urgency) or just big stuff needing time - to write, to compose, to think, to analyse. So email answering time is a wrong metric by definition.
How long does setting up an exhibition take, and what kind of hours are you expecting? 4-8 are workday hours?
And what kind of question needs to be answered that fast, but wasn't important enough to be asked several days earlier? My feeling is that there should be very few such questions, few enough that each artist can safely take half a day if they get one.
A day and a half is slow even in software, and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
Sure, software does have bad communicators who change their minds, but revert is relatively easy.
> A day and a half is slow even in software,
We're talking about half a day, not a day and a half. Or really, less than half a day.
> and software doesn't have things like the example given of wanting a wall put up then asking for it to be taken down again.
The wall example was taking place over "weeks". If there is still an urgent question about wall-building a few days out then it sounds like someone waited much too long and that's the real problem, not the extra four hours.
If everyone is there to set up your exhibition at a certain agreed upon time, then you should be engaged and answering any questions immediately if not sooner, regardless of how long it takes to set up the exhibition.
Certain agreed upon time? Yes, of course. You should probably be there for most of it too.
But once you're covering multiple days, no, a single person should not be expected to respond lightning fast the entire time. And the several day scenario is what the comment I replied to talked about.
Unfortunately it's one of those hacks that makes your look like a superhuman. I hate it but obsessively answering emails and messages as soon as possible has given me so many opportunities that it feels like a cheat code. It's nothing reasonable about it but it's just the way things are.
When people complain about this they aren't thinking about how much they love people not answering them. Obviously not everything needs to be answered quickly all the time but the world is full of delays and waiting. Any relief is welcome.
So how does that work, can you elaborate?
What is the difference if you answer in 10 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours? Are you competing on time of response so if you're fast you're getting the deal?
I can only speak for myself - I produce exec/board materials. Often a request will go out to several people and I can get ahead by responding first. Sometimes someone will reply to me quickly and the edge I bring is properly digesting their response and then going back quickly to them with questions. Others might accept they have a reply and then wait until they are pulling the paper together to realise they are missing key data.
I don’t read or action all emails instantly, but I am very aware of the ones I need to, or when I am in a period of high focus that needs information fast.
In an ideal world I’d be in an office with all the people I needed around me, all with the same focus and priorities, but that is rarely the case. So to excel at my job I need to make connections fast and respond fast. (Note this isn’t just email, this is just for my communications in general.)
Replying quickly looks like you care and you already know what's going on. It also suggests that you'd be willing to have even more synchronous conversations (phone calls, trips together, etc.)
Doing it during business hours matters more than off hours outside of major deadlines or event prep.
With many organizations, if you want to give this impression and also shut down communications to focus, you need blocks of time outside of business hours where you focus. For example, I know a responsive executive who cannot be reached from 6am-9am every weekday, when most people aren't trying to get hold of him. This is when he writes and reads. Even then, his assistant fields communications so he doesn't seem to have disappeared.
Not saying you should do this or that it's for everybody.
I remember one event vividly.
Exec asked for some business information information while traveling.
I replied promptly, sending a link to a webpage, within the proper process for secure data sharing according to company policy. This required exec to visit our internal website to view the information.
A teammate emailed the information directly, violating policy and good data stewardship.
CEO replied to teammate's email with a big group thank you for "emailing the information quickly".
That is classic, but you knew it would go like that when you sent the link, didn't you? :)
My experience is the complete opposite. It’s a weak point like a supermarket that is still open at 11 pm. Do I need it? No, but I’ll take the service anyway since it’s free.
How is it a weak point for a supermarket to be open at 11? 24 hour supermarkets are fantastic and have saved my bottom many a time.
Do I _need_ it? No, I don't _need_ much of anything other than air to breathe and a bit of food in my belly. Most people don't just settle for that though.
Obligatory song to the last part of your message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm8oxC24QZc (Eddie Vedder - Society)
It has always resonated with me.
Very interesting. How do you square this with the times you need to concentrate?
This is an uncharitable take. Who said anything about an interruption every 20 minutes? We're talking about an artist doing an exhibition at a gallery, by any measure, this is a pretty significant collaboration that is in the artist's best interest and not something their getting spammed with dozens of a times a day.
If you read and digest the article, the point is not to create a litmus test based on time-to-response, it's to recognize there are a lot of people to talk a big game but are unserious about achieving shared goals.
If an artist is not responsive because they are so serious about their creative process that they don't have time to respond to a gallery doing an exhibition than maybe that's the right thing for what they are serious about, but it does jack shit for the gallery staffer who is serious about creating an exhibition.
Artists tend to be in art production mode or sales mode. When in sales mode and doing exhibitions, etc., good ones are very responsive.
They work for a a year, or maybe several, then there are sales to be had over the corse of a month or so. The work they are selling is finished.
Would you work on something for years, and then when the time comes to maybe sell it — not answer the phone?
People that work at art galleries are not artists.
The bit in the article about email responsiveness concerned artists
Though they do play a crucial role in selling and promoting the art
depends on the gallery, some make you work a shift if you want to sell your art there
Not professional artists (in the UK)? Curation is a separate skill, and you're paying through the nose for the gallery's services, usually.
it depends, but i tried to sell my paintings at local galleries and some wanted me to do things like that
Are you a professional [earning most of your money through your art]? Which country do you live in please?
I've only seen the self-curation from community groups. I'm all for collectives but I'm pretty sure the professional artists I know would say it gives off budget/desperate vibes and so it's something you can't afford to do if you aspire to 'make it [big]'.
{I express myself through overuse of parentheses and through runon sentences...}
i did take some issue with the way that point was phrased as well.
but, i took it a little more broadly than it was actually specified: people who are not great about communicating or make it hard for you to work with them at the outset will probably continue to be like that throughout the entirety of your working relationship.
i watch some videos on the Tested youtube channel, where the host is Adam Savage, who was one of the hosts/creators of the MythBusters tv show, and he often talks about this point, and how he learned it working with Jamie Hyneman early on in his career where they would take clients, and Jamie explained this principal.
You’re trying to systematise something that is more like basic human nature. It’s like trying to explain why people like attractive people from a utilitarian perspective.
In the real world I just prefer to interact with people who prioritise me over other things and most people are the same.
Yet some artists do believe that it's morally wrong that producing whatever they deem as good art isn't guaranteed to be self-supporting. They shouldn't ultimately have to answer to anyone else's opinion to earn a living. Which is highly entitled, and non-evolutionary.
Anyone who thinks that the Universe owes them is sorely mistaken.
He didn't mention a timescale. Maybe it's a difference between 4 hours and 1 day? I would agree that if someone takes longer than a day to respond, then it's going to be hard to work with this person. 4 hours is fine.
I interpreted it as "artists who are reasonable people produce better art."
IE, focus more on qualities like: Asking to move a wall at the last minute, needing a life counselor...
Becoming recognized as a good artist depends a great deal on being an effective communicator about one's work. It's sort of self-selecting but it is part of the job.
Yep, this wouldn’t necessarily apply to everyone — especially those who balance multiple roles
All people are not alike. Thankfully. Refer Law of Requisite Variety. Some people live to please.
Once you understand people are very different, the whole story turns into setting teams up such that the right people are in the right role. Ofcourse this is hard to pull off, so there is always drama in any group.
I have found that folks like Jensen, Elon, Jobs, etc answer their emails in 5-10 min. You be the judge.
They have EA’s that can go through their inboxes for them and highlight what actually needs a response. Hell they probably draft responses for them too
And that is so because they made it a priority for it to be so.
you are wrong. you probably think someone tweets for elon as well lol.
This is not just some art thing. People note it in every field. It's not the only predictor; the author of Chrome reportedly did most of it offline IIRC. But it's a real phenomenon that is robust in the face of the concerns you're raising. There is a wide range of email responsiveness -- even among people who are going to the bathroom and putting on birthday parties and doing focus work -- and it is a helpful predictor.
I enjoyed reading this, but I felt that 90% of this person’s experience was simply the result of being a real contributor in an organization with non-existent expectations/completely un-optimized state/no other real contributors.
In other words it’s easy to make a difference as a high performer in a low performance organization.
Again not detracting from this persons achievements, I just don’t think these most of these observations apply in high performIng organizations
I got a similar sense, especially the section where they talked about needing to build trust before trying to change things. I do volunteer photography, and feel the same way as this article any time I do a shoot for a small organization that has never gotten good photos for their business before. It's super rewarding, but a completely different thing than my dayjob managing a solid team of engineers.
There are a lot more low performing organizations than high performing ones. Even organizations usually perceived as high performing tend to have a few high performing teams surrounded by oceans of mediocrity.
And if you're this kind of person you can absolutely crush it at certain types of non-profits and NGOs that attract people with a lot of ideas but no work ethic.
At least if you're okay with being the only person with any ambition. Personally I have to flee from those environments.
It’s not necessarily more easy to be great in a low performance organisation. Often these organisations are low performant for a reason. The worst one egos, drama and politics
Which can be an incredibly important realization.
If you don't have access to high performing institutions for whatever reason, this is how you can leverage a position in a low performing institution to achieve a lot of success.
> In other words it’s easy to make a difference as a high performer in a low performance organization.
And yet, the big takeaway for me is that to be a high performer it isn’t enough to A) know what needs to be done, or B) be able to do it well. The key is C) figuring out the incentive landscape.
His story of carving out his own job only to find he had no support from the board is what I’ve tried before. In my low performing organization, I thought I could be a high performer by knowing what needed to be done and doing it well. Everybody I directly worked with loved me and thought I was highly effective, but I never made any lasting change like this author. I didn’t understand the need to skip way up the levels until I was already burnt out.
Thanks for sharing. Henrik Karlsson is one of my favourite writers on the internet at the moment. His other piece called "Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process" [1] left such a big impression on me and I return to it frequently, highly recommend.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816150009/https://www.henri...
He’s a struggling writer who moved to a barren island where homeschooling his kid isn’t illegal like it is in mainland Sweden. He did this so he and his family could pursue a more meaningful life and he could make a go of it as a writer.
If you love his content please consider chipping in to his substack to help keep these great pieces coming out instead of linking the archive. It’s why he was working at the gallery in the first place instead of writing full time.
An alternative, more nuanced, realistic version of "follow your passion" ? Follow your passion might have ended up in "follow your vision", "vision" used here as the article defines it. The article makes a case for "follow your context", a more workable version of the popular adage. Thought provoking !
Wow, that was a great essay. It describes the process I've been using for the past 10 years to design a happy life. I had no words to describe it in a good way, but now I have.
Great essay, just read it
The article itself is fantastic. However, this is a great example of what makes catnip for HN -
1) Use scientific terms (e.g. vector fields, waves resonance) 2) Cite tech influencers (e.g. Sholto Douglas, Tyler Cowen) 3) Make the subject an abstract novel field that most developers or tech folk don't really pay attention and use #1 and #2 to make it relevant
You forgot be smug and entitled. He does that a lot.
Honestly, the entire blog feels that way: referencing the same old tropes and personalities in a slightly novel context. A sort of a comfort read for the web2.0 nostalgia crowd.
I guess this approach worked, since it allowed the author to go on writing full time in Denmark (HCoL), which is an achievement these days.
People here in the comments seem to focus on whether it is possible to predict an artist's success based on secondary "civic" virtues, and criticize the author for having subjective criteria for what "success" means. I'd argue that independently of how you measure success, all other things being equal, having diligence and other civic virtues will get you further, on average.
That said, the most interesting lessons are in the first and sixth (the 2nd 6th, the actual 6th) item: How to do a better/more widely scoped job than what you got hired for (by understanding how interests, incentives and responsibilities align in an org) and the fact that in most places, most people are not serious (meaning they tend to not go deeper, look at the big picture, etc.).
I think the point is more that there are indicators that a person is in conflict with their own mission. Struggles to respond, complains, focuses on the immaterial. I think OP is completely right. When a person is aligned, they get out of their own way, this people are easy to differentiate. One produces mediocre work, the other produces great stuff. I also agree it’s within the power of the individual to be either.
I like this view. Still, this seems a way of reasoning about that artist’s success at that particular gallery - perhaps the artist is busy with art projects that are better aligned with them.
Quite likely, though I think we are talking about different things. OP and I are talking to shared alignment, where they came together to sell art for mutual benefit and how to spot good partners to work with. Sure if a partner isn’t good for you, they might have other places where they work well, but I think that’s out of scope to the article IMO.
> If we want to make the world a better place, we can’t just think about the lofty stuff: we have to get our hands dirty and make sure the economic engine works.
This seems a very narrow if not conformist view of art.
Artists doing graffiti, participating in hobby groups, state funded projects, discovered by later generations, etc - they don’t care about making viewers feel good about funding; and yet their art can very much make the world a better place.
It is perhaps a narrow view, but not an incorrect one.
You mention state funded projects, but the funding has to come from somewhere else. What the author is saying is this: it takes money to run a gallery (or a museum, for that matter), therefore even if it is not the primary objective, we should strive to keep the money flowing so that we can make have better galleries/museums.
The narrowness makes it incorrect.
Galleries are necessarily behind the curve because they're businesses and have to stay afloat. You typically don't go to a gallery to see something new, but to see the works of an already established artist.
Meanwhile interesting, innovative art happens outside of galleries, but you have to look for it, as there's an oversupply of aspiring artists.
Bottom line is you can't base the whole art scene on the opinions of art galleries, as they play it safe and art is strictly about the opposite.
Actually the money doesn’t have to come from anywhere, that’s my point. If we cut all state funding - I’m sure artists would continue making art, as they did for millenia. We encourage art with state funding because we consider it beneficial to the society[1].
The “keep the money flowing” approach distracts from making art and leads to making art that sells well. Do we really want that to dominate galleries/museums?
[1]: “American taxpayers concur, with 55% supporting increasing federal investment in the arts, 57% supporting state government funding for the arts and 58% supporting local government funding for the arts” https://www.delawareartsalliance.org/government-funding-arts...
The article glosses over the bosses and board members, but it feels that’s where the story is. Often art institutions are not optimized to make money for the organization, but rather to employ specific people or make specific people visible in a desired way. Hence the workshops and fundraisers. I suspect that’s why the boss, eventually becomes just a „first boss”.
> But if someone else isn’t measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people who have already decided.
This reminded me of the part in Good to Great where one company's success was attributed to setting up a steel factory in a agriculture-heavy area, where the residents were farmers who were already predisposed to working hard.
I'm curious if, on the flip side, anyone has any strategies for "convincing someone to measure up" as the author puts it.
I suspect that would need to be highly specific to the individual, their personality, past experiences and current situation.
Nice to read. I didn't guess that the article would be so fun to read and insightful. I wouldn't have even read it if it wasn't ranked 1 in hackernews.
Some years ago I decided that, at some point in my life, I would try and involve myself with a gallery or museum.
As with all things, it depends, but it seems to me that in such places you can find some of the most authentic and driven people out there. And it's probably quite fun to work with them.
Artists are like engineers. The types of decisions the two groups make are wildly different, but each group makes decisions for a living and focuses the rest of their time on craftsmanship.
Also like engineers, the best make far better decisions, or are far better craftsmen, or both.
> the most authentic
I have found the most authentic folks are the low-key ones that have a booth at an arts festival or some other show.
I've been to galleries, and thought the vibe was really un-authentic. maybe I've been to the dysfunctional ones. Maybe that it is that galleries are more about something else than the art, more meta. (and they sold art not like this community gallery)
Don't know the reality of museums.
The small community galleries I know are filled with artists who also have a booth at the local arts festivals - and they definitely sell art!
I don't get what you're trying to say. Most art galleries are businesses. They exhibits artists and artworks that sell. There is nothing un-authentic or dysfunctional about it; to put it more precisely, dysfunctional art galleries won't last very long, just like any other business that offers products that aren't in demand and don't attract buyers.
Are you saying that galleries usually don't last very long and tend to be commercial failures?
I'm saying:
Talking to a guy in an arts festival booth, the conversation is usually about the art.
Talking to a guy in a gallery (in the US, that sells art for other people), the conversation is usually about me (sizing up a sales prospect).
Note that galleries I'm talking about are for-profit - selling people's artwork and paying the rent. If you do talk to the artist, it is some artist-attends gathering and there are a lot of other people talking to the frazzled artist too.
the gallery in the article seems different, it is a community coop and might have a different dynamic.
People there not just working for financial gain but for the preservation and promotion of something meaningful (I mean in most cases)
Curious they say in the first paragraph, "didn’t speak the language" but then seemingly very quickly started attending board meetings and taking notes? With no further mention of learning Danish. Seems like a notable achievement!
...they probably spoke in English for them at board level. Good for his benefit, also very good for theirs, too.
*where i am, any engineer (of any type) that can't speak English, is classed as an idiot (and probably benefitted from nepotistic [mal-] practices).
How dare someone not respond to the email of a gallery coffee director within the hour! Obviously that makes them a bad artist. I like how the OP has anointed himself as the judge of other's work but instead of actually judging the work itself based on its own merits (which he can't be bothered to do) he instead relies on personal attacks and poor measurements like how fast someone responds to an email from him.
Maybe these artists were put out by the odd relationship of corresponding with the guy who runs the coffee stand for their show? He strikes me as the kind of person who needs to be involved in everything, but doesn't really care about anything. Huge ego and constantly judging everyone around him. He would make an excellent manager in corporate america.
The insights on how the best artists resemble top startup founders hit home. It's amazing how professionalism and a relentless drive to improve can make someone a joy to work with—and how the opposite traits predict mediocrity and headaches.
Another, perhaps less triumphant account of the art world is here: https://profilebooks.com/work/all-that-glitters/ which for me is a very interesting read. If reading isn't your thing then it has a good audio book, but also this might be of interest https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001nwhs
He set them up for success, and then left. With no mention of choosing a successor! Without that, they will fall back into bad decisions in months and blow through their 'war chest' the first year.
My wife reorganized the after-school program for our elementary school, got it on an upward trajectory, got grants and some money in the bank to pay for exceptional bills. And left, without choosing a successor.
Of course, the staff blew through the savings instantly, because they didn't know the budget or the purpose of having some margin for safety. Had to raise rates and reduce hours and all the bad things, just to keep going. All the time thinking it wasn't their fault, just the bad old world that didn't want to give them money for free to blow on their whims.
I think the biggest win for this job was not the six points identified, but the author gained their boss's trust; got project alignment to the organization's mission, and earned more autonomy.
In essence the task-oriented leading was switched to area-of-responsibility leading. That is, instead of giving a list of tasks to complete by the author, an AoR was given, and all tasks initially verified, then allowed to move forward as the author saw it fit. It is task-oriented vs. AoR-Oriented leadership.
Basically, in large part this worked because of the job context and the leadership of the boss.
This essai reminds me of someone a few years back telling me that Artists and Startups where very similar. - "What ?" I replied confused. - "Yes ! We work for nothing, crafting a unique skills and hoping to find Product Market Fit. Of either an original Software or an special Sculpture. The economic is for both an economic of big incertinity.
Galleries bet on a few Artists among many just like YCombinator bets on a few startups every years hoping for the best.
Lovely article! It induced an unexpected feeling of nostalgia for me personally as I previously worked at an large public art gallery. I was part of the marketing team and my role focused mostly on the digital side: web updates and digital signage throughout the space. The description of great artists in the article resonated with me; the best ones where those that truly did it for the art and were surprisingly humble.
That's not to say that all amateur artists are self-centered; I met plenty of up and coming artists that felt like wizened "old souls" without ego, and playful at heart. I think they were just great artists in the making!
Even though it wasn't the most high paying job, it was really fun being part of the visual art heartbeat in a city.
0. There's money laundering.
I went into this article with a lot of skepticism, but the author has some excellent points. Here's one, as an example.
On dealing with people (in his case, artists): "if...someone isn't measuring up, I have no idea how to convince them to do so. So I look for people [who do]." I.e., don't waste your time on people who are "demanding or confused or slow at answering their email".
Lots of other interesting points!
> I am very much in that direction myself; I found it, for example, almost shameful to turn on paid subscriptions on my blog.
Almost.
Turns out my landlord doesn't take almost-bucks.
And yet he didn't appear to find it shameful to persuade unpaid volunteers to do the job he was in fact being paid to do.
Linkedin is leaking?
?
Linkedin is infamous for "what doing something unrelated taught me about B2B sales" or similar kinds of slop.
i was a security guard at an art museum for a long time. it was the only job i could find after being laid off from my software gig. thanks for sharing
This is odd. What country and period was it?
Before Covid, everyone on LinkedIn was bombarded with job offers as and soon as they created an account and put anything IT related on it.
USA/2022
I was a php dev. Sort of the Wild West over here
How many deep insights can you really gain on an entire industry by working in it for 2 years? And starting off in a separate industry which just happens to be located within the other?
artists aren't like startup founders. let's stop using that archetype to describe everything.
>So instead of selling coffee, I looked into how we could streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it.
So he persuaded unpaid volunteers to do the work he was being paid to do?
Nobody has a problem with this?
this is kind of mindblowing... just... WAT?!?!
getting through that first section makes me want to take nothing this guy says seriously. the insanity of it...
I grew up immersed in the art world—my father is an artist, and my sister is a curator working on exhibitions for institutions like MoMA and the Reina Sofia Museum, and linked to a known dead artist. Based on my lifelong experience in this environment, here are my thoughts:
Art as a Business: Selling art is predominantly a business, and, frankly, quality often doesn't play the leading role. Market dynamics, branding, and influence have a much stronger impact on an artist’s commercial success. Many buyers lack a refined taste for art but are guided by curators, galleries, or social trends to invest in one artist over another. This is particularly true outside the realm of blue-chip artists like Picasso, van Gogh, or Bacon, where established market signals guide decisions.
Theory and Practice: while I love the theoretical discussions around art (e.g. Walter Benjamin) I find these ideas largely irrelevant to the business side of the art market. Theory has its place in academia and criticism, but it often feels disconnected from the pragmatic realities of selling and promoting art.
If you're interested in understanding how the art world operates, I highly recommend visiting Art Basel or similar art fairs. These events showcase the intersection of commerce, curation, and culture, providing a fascinating snapshot of the art market's priorities and trends. I personally did my own art intervention with technology and received known artists who wanted to participated in the experiment and beyond the project originality it would not work in other contexts without some validation (being in a space in Wynwood [1]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynwood