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Comment by Croftengea | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting take on Dali's art. The article portrays Dali as a greedy businessman first, an artist second:

> Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them.

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This particular fact just sounds like good logistical sense. If I'm going to sign 2000 prints I might as well do it in one batch.

Also might as well sign all them together, before mass production, rather than waiting for them to be differentiated into different prints: that way they are printed on demand from a central source rather than signed on demand from many different sources.

I suspect it might be misleading to say he signed them "before he knew what would be printed on them". They were authorized with a specific set of prints (his work), it wasn't like they could just draw anything and sell it.

Not to say he wasn't greedy. I would say the more direct point was

> "(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,” said Noah Charney, an art historian and author of The Art of Forgery.

but I'm not really sure being good at logistics makes you greedy.

I used to work in fine art printmaking. The weird thing about signing blank paper before the prints are done is that usually not every print in a run will make it into the final edition.

If you are doing say an edition of 100 prints, you will maybe print 130-150 of them, and then choose the 100 best ones to actually publish. This gives leeway for misprints and imperfections.

Prints are ususally numbered by the artist when signed, so presumably Dali would either have not been numbering these and having the printmaker number them once the final prints in the edition are determined. That, or he was numbering them and they just didn't have the same quality-control that a typical edition would have.

Just businessman. You can't be greedy if you're the only employee, you're already keeping everything for yourself. Trying to make more money off the market by increasing output is just "doing more business". Shrewd, sure, but definitely not greedy.

This seems like a narrow technical definition that doesn't really align with how people use the word in common day-to-day speech.

Might not in general but in this case there is nothing greedy with just optimizing the process. Hell, arguably less time for menial stuff more time for art

I think that commenter is quite aware of the popular stereotype of the "greedy businessman", and is countering exactly that.

You can be greedy in the same way companies can be greedy but providing poor value for the money in ways that aren’t obvious at the point of sale.

Ie: Selling counterfeit goods at the full cost of the actual product in question.

I'd argue the other direction - it's requisite to be greedy in order to be a businessman, otherwise you'd take a vow of poverty, live off charity, and give away your work for free.

>> a greedy businessman first, an artist second:

A reasonable description of every successful artist, or at least those who saw success during their lifetimes.

I doubt Dali ever had Warhol beat in that department. Warhol claimed that commercial success was an essential part of his art.

Different medium, but I've always been impressed with the commercialism of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

He pioneered the multimedia empire with Tarzan -- books, comic books, radio, movies... he was happy to make money off of any way he could.

> The article portrays Dali as a greedy businessman first, an artist second:

That's not a novel idea. It was claimed contemporaneously by other artists, if I recall correctly.

Does that really portray anything? All I get is that he was a fan of batched processing.

Did you read the article? It's just one quote that shows the scale of his "art" production. It also shows he cared more about the output and money flow than what is actually printed and distributed under his name and signature. If it's not enough here is more:

> “(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,”

> The artist’s appetite for money ... made him a black sheep to many colleagues.

His greediness is the main reason the market of the fake lithographs exists in the first place.

Other artists calling him out isn't convincing to me. Every rock band that makes it big is a "sellout" to their unsuccessful colleagues. He had art that people wanted so he sold it widely and efficiently. Is that not the description of every monetarily successful artist? Or are you supposed to make poor business decisions and stumble into success on accident?

Am I also very greedy for writing code once that gets executed millions of times and used to charge hundreds of thousands of customers?

If an artist isn’t maniacal and going against the convention their colleagues demand, I don’t want them.

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