Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Has this person not actually been on the Internet?

There is a huge, sprawling market of art online. And I don't mean stuff with the cultural approval of the gallery system. I mean, say, people making a living by drawing mind-control commissions on Deviantart. Paying the bills by cranking out custom art of folk's furry characters on Furaffinity. Selling commissions of weird stuff via Tumblr. Folks doing web comics and selling ads/books/t-shirts. Custom clothes/jewelry/chainmail/whatever on Etsy. Patreon is helping too - lotsa people are starting to say "hey I just wanna draw some COOL STUFF and if you like my themes then help support me doing it" in various ways on that site.

This economy has been booming ever since Paypal made it easy to give someone money online.

None of it is "Fine Art". No small amount of it is pornography. It is not glamorous. It is not pretentious. A hell of a lot of it is amateurs still learning. But there is a lot of it, and some of it is amazing.

Seriously: I have a friend who put his wife through nursing school, and is still helping to support her and their child, by drawing outrageous furry latex bondage commissions.

Carter, the author, here. Yes I've been on the Internet. In fact, I love and grew up on the Internet, wrote my first lines of code in middle school, and procrastinated my way through high school on sites like Deviant Art. I've been reading Hacker News daily for over 5 years.

This essay was written with the WSJ audience (average age over 50) in mind. That audience is more familiar with the established art world and its $66B market. For an audience that grew up on the Internet like me, I would have used more nuanced language and talked more about the importance of merging the existing art market and the established art world with the more organic art communities already online.

But here's the tl;dr version of what I would have written for HN:

The Internet will grow the art market and broaden it to include artists outside of the existing establishment–the result is that more artists will be able to make a living without having to appeal to the existing system. But achieving this requires working with the established art world, e.g. major galleries and museums, to publish more of their art online for easy and free access–making art and art education accessible to everyone, not just those with the time and money to go visit in person. By moving the existing art world online, you're bringing its market of buyers and sellers with it, and exposing them to a more vibrant, diverse, and organic ecosystem that many readers on Hacker News are already familiar with. In summary, by increasing awareness and education about art history, the Internet will drive greater passion and market demand for art, which ultimately means more artists from all over the world will get discovered organically and be able to pursue their passions more sustainably.

Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike. Today, it's still very rare for a visual artist to experience that kind of success if they are not part of the existing establishment. But the Internet is going to change that, and this will be a great thing for all of us.

By "art" you mean "paintings" and "sculptures", right?

I think art is already mainstream... Roger Ebert, one of our great art critics, said that movies allow you to have empathy -- to see the world through someone else's eyes. IMO, that's what art is for, and I do think that movies do a great job of this -- and are for everybody.

Thanks for the article.

I really like what you've done with Artsy.

The art market is already using the internet to great effect. Like you write in your article, many of the gallery sales are now online. Work can even be sold in advance of the physical exposition opening.

However, if one might be tempted to correlate internet-based business with openness and even educational inspirations: that’s not the commercial art world I know of. Because in most of these cases collectors will have had a password to the restricted part of the gallery website.

That entire $60B art market is in a continuous effort to make scarce and unreachable what is at the basis an abundant resource. Hence the passwords handed out to selected collectors. Or, for example, what’s the logic of taking an image with a digital camera, and promising to print it only 5 times? It’s an economic logic of promoting scarcity, and it works really well—contemporary art auctions have gone through the roof this year.

At the same time, as art is moving to digital artefacts, the notion of scarcity on which the art world is built is bound to blow up at some point—like you, I’m confident that the internet will help us come up with new ideas of what it is to be an artist, and what it is to produce art. Yet the gallery circuit is the last place where I’d go looking for answers…

> Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike.

You know, I see this argument a lot and I'm not buying it. To paraphrase Nate Silver in "The Signal and the Noise": just because the internet provides an exponential amount of information to the public doesn't mean everyone is smarter, because with every increase in total information there is an increase in bad information. The solution is basically better curation. Curation, in today's world, is still run by individuals and people in positions of power. Music, just like information, has seen an explosion in data points since the advent of the internet. All of this becomes democratized until it doesn't. In other words - these markets go from non-democratized (the CD world), to democratized (YouTube), and the back again (Spotify/Rdio). Cheaper access to art creation only means the market is more saturation. The signal to noise ratio (i.e. chance) stays the same, it just means a lot more noise exists.

The original article didn't make a lot of sense, comparing a compact and now electronic media with physical art. It is one thing to listen to and purchase 10,000 songs, it is another to accumulate even 100 paintings/sculptures/original works of art.

One thing I have been fascinated with is the impact of China's artists. There are a lot of them. A painter can work for weeks on a high quality reproduction of a large classical painting with a market price in the hundreds of dollars. Unnerving for an artist living in the developed world.

To refer to online "art" is an over-generalization. Art takes many forms – peoems, essays, illustrations, ascii art. And yes, this has all been "on the internt" since the beginning.

Artsy seems to be addressing a specific segment of this market: that which you would find in galleries, museums and personal collections. It is an traditional world that is entrenched in old distribution methods. And, trom what I can see, it is ripe for disruption – which Artsy seems to be doing quite well.

Disclaimer: Carter pitched me on the idea at one point. I was sold ;)

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