Why are artists so committed to the starving artist bit? Commercial art has historically been a very lucrative career, and while that has changed somewhat in the 21st century I can't help but think artists are partially at fault.They've resisted becoming office workers and companies have responded in kind by turning creative work into gig work and telling artists to market themselves on artstation. With AI we've seen another retreat, many talented pros leaving and expressing they will make it on their etsy shop alone (lol) and telling other artists to do the same.It's like artists agreed to the worst parts of both being your own business - no steady paycheck - and being a wage slave - asskissing, strict hours. If artists want stable jobs with benefits they shouldn't see themselves as different than the factory worker.
>>7245995The sheer amount of corpodrones just accepting to be treated like slaves is the reason why things are the way they are tho, if more people were "starving artists" instead of sending resumes to Disney things would be better
>>7245995nodraw detected
>>7246009categorically untrue because of the entire 20th century. animators were making good money in the 20th century, they received bonuses that would make ML tech bros blush.
>>7246012like just look at some of the demands they were getting during animator strikes, they convinced almost every single studio to not offshore a single job in the 70s by striking.the problem with the starving artist thing is that you face way more competition with other workers than you do as a unionized wage slave, which turns into a steep race to the bottom and the low piece meal wages artists get now for pro work.
>>7246012The animators you are talking about do not create when they are on the job, they are prime example of being in the hands of the idea guy, that's not what artists really want from their craft, not even these animators.
>>7246017yea no shit, and programmers don't really get to code their own autistic compilers. Welcome to office work.That psychology has led to less stability and you don't even have more freedom because now you have to appeal to dumbass normies for like whose tastes are far more capricious than a studio exec.
>>7246019my entire point is that being a small business fucking sucks, and it sucks especially if you are an artist owned small business, but idiot artists keep stabbing each other in the back for this low paying high risk dream.
>>7246019>Welcome to office work.You sound like you hate it, why do you even wonder that others don't want to be part of it?> because now you have to appeal to dumbass normies for like whose tastes are far more capricious than a studio exec.Not really all that different, but the point is that "starving artist" does not appeal to dumbass normies either. A "starving artist" is the one who want to communicate their own vision, regardless of how appealing to the masses it will be.
>>7246027You keep on proving my point, artists choosing this over the stable easy job - one that does allow them to occasionally produce their own vision too see Treasure Island - for a fairy tale they tell themselves which has led to the cheapening of their work.And if you are really committed to the whole starving artist freedom & vision lie you tell yourselves the only real option is outsider art which carries all the pain of making your own stuff with none of the fame/prestige.
>>7246035>Treasure Islandtreasure planet sry
>>7246035yeah, i'm proving your point that you will never understand wanting to create your own things, you have a tunnel vision how it's all about money and can't comprehend when someone doesn't give a fuck about it. > one that does allow them to occasionally produce their own vision too This is the real fairy tale right here, be real, most artist in corporate field will never produce their own vision, those who will are the exception rather than the rule.
>>7246059> when someone doesnt give a fuckhate to break this to you but we live in a society where you need to make money to exist. Again this is about > commerical art if you want to do hobby art as I do or outsider art and have a job then great.
>>7246059you seem really fucking stupid which kinda answers my question why artists chose this absolutely shit deal for the lie their fine arts professors probably taught them
>>7246064>hate to break this to you but we live in a society where you need to make money to exist.really? I had no clue.>if you want to do hobby art as I do or outsider art and have a job then greatsee? You still do not understand what it means to not give a fuck about money and still pursue art not as a hobby, even tho historically this sort of thing is not unheard of.>>7246067The way you are upset because you don't understand something is endearing, similar to toddler
>>7245995>Commercial art has historically been a very lucrative career"commercial art" is an insignificant blip in art history, and artists have been poor and starving and reliant on rich people giving them food and accommodations for literal millennia
>>7246083Cool never complain that you can't make the $3000 rent in LA or about AI so that you can keep your persecution complex and your vision alive. Like a virgin that doesn't know what she wants.
>>7246100There's this thing called capitalism that developed. Should we also return to slavery or hunter gathering you actual shit for brains?
>>7245995>Commercial art has historically been a very lucrative careerIf by historically you mean for a couple of decades, sure.So was cobbling and delivering milk.
>>7246103that thing called capitalism decided there's a lot more supply than demand for art so it's worthless now, retard
>>72461041920s - 2010 isn't a bad run at all. Beats out farm workers and tech
>>7246109You're 50 years off from lucrative.
>>7246108Oooh watch out the economics understander arrived. See the post artists enforce their own competition thereby lowering their worth. This hasnt always been the case and if anything it's accelerating with AI
>>7246114Wrong. Animators had hundred thousand dollar bonuses in 1990s.
>>7246116you're a fucking imbecile, pyw
>>7246119See history of animator strikes. I already referenced this but you just came in with your knee jerk reddit reaction.
>just charge more bro>market doesn't decide the value of labor bro>so what if there's a thousand times more people drawing, it's still worth the same bro
>>7246122>digital asset producer strikeholy shit what year do you think it is?
>>7246101>rent in LA>your persecution complex Never knew I wanted to live in LA, never mind about persecution complex, omg it's just like a virgin that doesn't know what she wants. I have a question tho, why do you decide what I want and why the virgin is female?
>>7246103Hurray for consumerism, peak culture has arrived, capitalism for all!
>>7246142yes.
>>7246152Bullseye, THE origin story.
>>7245995Drone work is bad. Not just for artists.>Security guards aren't actually armed, they just call police if they see anything and act as a deterrent>Many people are being primarily paid to be a security guard in all but name, because it turns out you just need live humans to deter 99% of other live humans from causing issues in your businessThis is why so many zoomers and millenials spend 2/3 their day on social media, they don't need to do much at work. It requires little focus, has no meaning, and low pay.Being an industry artist requires focus but also has no meaning, and low pay. You are actually replaceable, because companies figured out that as long as their productions are "inoffensive", they have enough brand recognition to coast by, and they pay sub-1% of their workforce (leads, but also actors where it counts) enough to steal the focus away, they could dillute things to where no single artist matters at all. Even the leads' styles get subsumed into generic slop.This process, along with the accessability of digital art, lowered the skill requirement for large industry teams, opening the floodgates for way more people to compete for working at disney, EA, hasbro and so on.A side effect of this is that nowadays you CAN be your own business. It was a super risky proposition pre-internet. And things are only getting better. So now you still might (depends on how gud u git and where you live) have shit pay, but you have something to focus on and which has meaning. 2/3 is what most "ideal" jobs have. 3/3 is being someone like Richard Stallman or Oda.If you want good pay for something that takes focus, truck driver.There are no jobs that have meaning, good pay, and don't require focus. That's basically being a child or living off the government teat.Your 1970s anecdote ignores that outsourcing was way more difficult pre-80s/90s. Domestic animators were the backbone.BTW: Retarded commie logic places indie artists as "petit boug", not proles.
>>7246009No they wouldn't. If you want things to be better, form a union and fight for better wages like everyone else. The first step to this is accepting proletarianization, though. Outside of the culture industry, at no point in American art history have artists done this except during the Great Depression / New Deal era, when the Works Progress Administration set up countless community art centers across the country and started paying artists a monthly wage to paint under the Federal Art Project. Many artists who rose to prominence after WW2, such as Jackson Pollock, got their start while on WPA payroll. Now, the issue of public sector unions tends to be different than private, especially today, but if you look up interviews with people who worked under the WPA-FAP and even other projects funded by the Department of the Treasury, they always wistfully wonder what our artistic landscape would've been like had the program survived the war. The history mid-century American modern art is a history of artists being compelled to ceded their newfound status as wage-laborers and reenter the art market (once again!) as self-employed artists.
>>7246353>BTW: Retarded commie logic places indie artists as "petit boug", not proles.It's true! Artists aren't wage-laborers. The manner in which we're paid is not systematized. It's often piecemeal through one-off commissions. But that's obvious, right? If an artist can't secure a commissions through a revolving door of patrons, then they're shit outta luck. Everything artists do to make money—from YCH auctions to Ko-fi tips to Patreon subscriptions, are done to make up for the fact that they aren't paid a wage.
>>7246418muricans are allergic to socialism, funnily enough murican animators can only dream the stuff Baseduzmultfilm was allowed to do under commies post ww2, the massive diversity in art styles and techniques alone speak for themselves, no other studio was able to do what this particular studio achieved, things like hedgehog in the fog would never be allowed to exist in murica.You want to know the most hillarious part about Baseduzmultfilm? After perestroika the animators being absolutely incapable of capitalistic thoughts democratically voted to give the studio to some young guy who then sold all the property for pennies and gave the ability to buyers to cut and edit the material any way they wanted, until the evil incarnated called Putin said "fuck this nonsense" and took it all back.
>>7246418Unions don't prevent the company from just canning everyone. Companies have homogenized their appearances such that they can shit everyone out and rehire when they want to. You are no longer needed as a skilled professional by a company, but as a "make picture machine." That's why so many industry drones hate AI - it holds a mirror up to their low-meaning job, forcing them to realize what they are doing and how their days would be numbered even without it.>Jackson PollockHe was literally propped up by the CIA as a way to show that the US was "more open and accepting" in comparison to the USSR's oppressive and strict limits on expression.The state should not be picking winners and losers, not even for artists.Throughout most of human history, if you weren't a literal slave your profession was meaningful and required focus. Humans do poorly psychologically when lacking in meaning. Your unions don't actually fix this.>>7246423It's retarded commie logic because even the commie dream is for resources to be so abundant that there's no conflict for everyone to own their own personal MOP, which would put all as "petit boug" due to the only scarce resources being things individuals create on-commission for each other for entertainment. Hating such people is dumb.
>>7246418You can't form a union in a field that can be worked in from home from anywhere on the planet, stop acting retarded.
>>7245995That lady has a nice ass
>>7246444>it holds a mirror up to their low-meaning job, forcing them to realize what they are doing and how their days would be numbered even without it.Sorry to bore you with my 'retarded commie logic' and this should be go without saying, but the threat of automation has always been used as a tool to quell worker dissent. It's not a new phenomenon in the slightest; what is new, is its specific application in the culture industry by way of generative AI through large language models. Proletarianization usually comes with labor deskilling processes (through machines/automation), but the intensity of that deskilling varies quite a bit, and very often isn't what it's chalked up to be. That's where union negotiations usually benefit people, even after they've been canned. It's why SAG-AFTRA, for instance, has been in the news a lot this past year and a half.>The state should not be picking winners and losers, not even for artists.New Deal-era Pollock was still a devout Regionalist and close friend of Thomas Hart Benton. All that Cultural Cold War shit happened after the war, and obviously without WPA support since the program was dissolved in 1943. The state wouldn't have had to covertly and arbitrarily prop up artists based around bullshit ideas of 'free enterprise painting' if it wasn't though. They could've just.. been more honest and kept having artists paint stuff that reflected the (often conservative) tastes of regional administrators. That would've opened up the possibility of those tastes changing organically and who knows (!) even perhaps favoring Abstract Expressionism in another guise. Or maybe not. The closest thing we have to the Federal Art Project today is the National Endowment of the Arts—a carryover from LBJ's 'Great Society' initiatives, but it totally fails in scope and character.
>>7246444>>7246689>if you weren't a literal slave your profession was meaningful and required focus [...] Your unions don't actually fix this.I cited the Artists Union and the WPA-FAP because if I were paid a livable wage to produce like 1-2 paintings a month (thanks in large part to pressure from the AU), I would have had so much free time, I wouldn't have known what to do with it. And this was only possible because, from the outset, a wage system was forcibly introduced to a sector of artistic production that historically, has always opposed it. Without it? I'd be begging for comms just as I am today. >Hating such people is dumb.Artists, at least artists of a petit-bourgeois persuasion, think they can escape the compulsion to wage labor by just making art. It's fine to want that, but I don't think it's necessarily worth aspiring to. So long as we live under capitalist totality, this is a privilege reserved for seldom few people. For artists, the 'commie dream' is not (should not) be reducible to that 'be your own boss :)))' type digital nomadism this anon >>7246448 is talking about.
>>7246691>I would have had so much free timeNo you wouldn't, because actual paintings take lots of preproduction and work and you very commonly only get the actual painting after 3 iterations.>inb4 digital is paintingNo.
>>7246703>No you wouldn'tJackson Pollock did. :^)
>>7245995>If artists want stable jobs with benefits they shouldn't see themselves as different than the factory worker.Commercial "artists" aren't real artists tho.You do have a point OP but you're talking about those fakes like they're a real artist and that's just wrong.Real artists hate anything to do with money and by extension capitalism by default.They don't care about making money, they don't even think about money at all.All they do is be lost in their art, they're busy with their work to think about anything else.They're too close to their art to whore it out.Perhaps we should call commercial artists something else, because despite having technique, they're not real artists at all, not even close.Fine art is about yourself while commercial art is about whoring your art out to greedy capitalists.
>>7246689>>7246691You really need a longer view of things. The art industry deskilled decades ago and all unions do is make the actual production inefficient and eventually kill the industries, as well as leeching money out of the workers and (as happens nowadays) being in bed with the companies to quash competing unions so nothing ever gets done.In like the 20s, carpenter unions opposed power tools and union leaders would get mad at people who were trying to improve their technique to hammer nails faster.>benefits people even after they've been cannedYou really don't grasp how little bargaining power even the collective of artists who would join such a union have.>if I were paid a livable wage to produce like 1-2 paintings a monthYou can already do this if you're good enough, live in a cheap enough country and keep your cost of living low.But really you're doing this weird dance where you're "pro-artist, anti-art." Because only someone who is anti-art would advocate for artists to be stuck making corporate slop and doing less art overall. You do not want to be an artist, you want the schmoozey hollywood-fantasy beret-wearing lifestyle of an artist, to be living in some cosmopolitan hive, wearing the badge of a corporation for all the social status points it gives, while barely making anything.
>>7246717Dripping paint on the floor isn't painting, agent Bootlicker
>>7246721do you find having no money a boon to your creativity?
>>7246734Not directly. It is a boon that I do not participate in normie consoomer bullshit due to this lack of money though.
>>7246738and what exactly art prospects are available outside of 'normie consoomer bullshit' that you engage in working freelance? My understanding is its mostly porn or corpo slop but low paid gig work and some niche indie comic stuff consumed by normies.
>>7246743Not having money means people don't even bother trying to pressure me into going to see marvel movies and eating mcdonalds and other crap. I pirate a lot of old shit that I know to be good entertainment, I selectively buy things that are good reference material. My eating is very clean because it is the foundation of everything else.I am a niche nsfw artist, yea. It's nice. People are friendly, they have cool ideas. They even keep offering to pay me more for things (I decline, because I want to only take money that I work for), because they genuinely are interested in supporting me so I can make more art.
>>7246717If Pollock, being the drunk that he was, could subsist off of WPA payroll for four years and still find the time to fuck around at Martha's Vineyard with the Bentons then so can I. >>7246721>You really need a longer view of things. Anon, last spring I was researching the division of labor in late medieval Flemish workshops as well as the historical legacy of the French Academe Royale system. Whatever view I've been struggling to formulate, it's probably much longer than you think I need. There many valid critiques of unionism, of which I won't expand on here.>carpenter unions opposed power tools and union leaders would get mad at people who were trying to improve their technique to hammer nails faster.This sounds like a microcosm of the much larger trends (that arguably started in the Gilded Age) where shifting industry standards + adoption of new materials led to the gradual abandonment of decorative arts among the trades? Like if you look at the history of the Painters Union (IUPAT), and then look at the kind of work they do now; all they ever do nowadays is industrial scale stuff. >You can already do this if you're good enough, live in a cheap enough country and keep your cost of living low.Ah yes, just move bro; become a digital nomad, live that #expat life. Sure. I can't think of anything more cosmopolitan, more hollywood-fantasy than that.
>>7246761>This sounds like a microcosm of the much larger trends (that arguably started in the Gilded Age) where shifting industry standards + adoption of new materials led to the gradual abandonment of decorative arts among the trades?It was that if they took longer on a job they got paid more, based on how the union managed to bargain things. Simple as.Union leaders frequently do not care about the end product, and industry-wide unions will happily cause entire workplaces to shut down, rather than accepting a middling deal. Because a bunch of people who lead unions or act as "consultants" are actually retarded marxist accelerationists and are trying to push consolidation of capital. Or just retarded marxists who care more about trying to "harm" businesses than protecting the workers.>Ah yes, just move bro; become a digital nomadNever said that. If you live some place cheap you can make art from there and sell to anyone in the world. You are posting on a website whose express purpose has been to share pictures around from the start. You don't have to live in thailand, you can live in Omaha or one of those cheap AF houses in Gary Indiana or a trailer park near Cincinnati or some other cheap place.
>>7246440Look at how retarded people are to think universal healthcare is a socialist policy in the US. There's no winning in this country
>>7246418All unions do is tax you even more.Gotta pay taxes to work.Gotta pay massive VAT for your tools.Gotta pay massive leftard taxes to live where the employment is because all studios just have to be in the shittiest cities. Now you gotta pay some retard union leader to say "sorry we can't help you" when everyone gets fired at the end of a project.
>>7246831>t. retardMy union got us a 10% raise this year
>>7246831Ok mr Bezos, you can go back to twatter now to keep sucking Elon's tiny dick.
