
Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process? - pmoriarty
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/art-artist-technicians-assistants-edingburgh-art-festival-turner-prize-andy-scott-lucy-skaer-a8452456.html
======
sageabilly
One of the longstanding examples of this that immediately sprung to mind is
Dale Chihuly
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly)),
the renown glass sculptor.

Except Chihuly has not physically produced ANY of the glass sculptures
attributed to him since 1979: "...he continued to blow glass until he
dislocated his right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident. No longer able
to hold the glass blowing pipe, he hired others to do the work."

It's an interesting thought experiment about what art actually IS: is art the
idea behind the piece? Is it the skill that the individual has in physically
bringing the piece to life? If the person with the vision doesn't physically
produce the outcome, is it still their art?

It's pretty easy to sit back and say "No, of course not, if you only have the
vision and don't do any of the work, then you don't get all of the credit!"
And yet, think about how this translates over to the technology world. Whose
name is associated with the iPhone? Steve Jobs. Did he, alone, design all
aspects of the device? Perhaps. Did he code every chip, bevel every edge,
sketch every wireframe? No. Did it come to fruition in a vacuum? Of course
not, and yet very few of us can name any of the other individuals who
collaborated with Jobs. Does Steve Jobs deserve credit for the invention? Of
course, and he signed off on every design decision and charted the course for
the device to come into existence. However, he was not an independent actor,
but a spearheading collaborator with a very large team coming together to work
on one project. And yet, Steve Jobs is the name we know.

So in that vein, is Dale Chihuly an artist? If he only designs the pieces (and
from what I've seen, "designing" consists of vaguely sketching out colored
shapes on large pieces of paper and then overseeing all of the glassblowers
who make the various parts of his sculptures) but he never physically produces
ANY of the sculptures attributed to his name, does he deserve all of the
credit? If he oversees the whole process, start to finish, and has final say
on every single aspect of the sculpture, should he be lauded for his vision
even though it was not his effort that brought that vision to life?

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> It's an interesting thought experiment about what art actually IS: is art
the idea behind the piece? Is it the skill that the individual has in
physically bringing the piece to life? If the person with the vision doesn't
physically produce the outcome, is it still their art?

I sincerely enjoy the fact that people regularly visiting Hacker News think
that is an "interesting thought experiment", in the context of art.

Isn't that an interesting thought experiment to question what does a CEO do,
for example? But it isn't, since people on HN are mostly familiar in detail
with what a CEO does. On the other hand art is somehow assumed to be a special
case in our world.

These are two absolutely equivalent questions.

~~~
pdpi
Except we attribute the product to the company, not the CEO. Wouldn't the
equivalent be "This is a MyArtStudio piece of art", rather than "this is a
piece of art by pdpi"?

~~~
TinyPants
We identify and categorize products through branding, which often has very
little to do with their corporate origin. The artist's name (and their story)
is a brand.

~~~
mc32
But, I wonder, once the “artist” dies, can the brand continue to produce with
the same or better renown?

~~~
filleokus
I haven't read a Tom Clancy book in ages, but it was just very recently I
learned that he had died, and that the books with Tom Clancy written all over
them in the airports in fact were not written by him.

~~~
wmf
If you see "Tom Clancy" on the cover he probably wrote it but if you see "Tom
Clancy's" that's a sign that somebody licensed his name. The same for Sid
Meier's Civilization and such.

------
billfruit
Prominent artists having an array of assistants and understudies who do most
of the detailing, while they themselves focus on more important matters like
choice of subject, medium, technique and composition seems to have been the
practice in the times of the Florentine and Roman masters, as I read from
"Agony and Ecstacy".

Even architects do something similar, did Zada Hadid design every cornice and
every pillar? I guess its the same with law firms also.

------
pmoriarty
As an artist, this article makes me so upset.

The people doing the actual work should be getting credit.

Of course the people coming up with the ideas should be getting credit too.

When one person comes up with the idea and another with product, it's a
collaborative work and credit should be shared.

Artists who try to pass off a work they merely collaborated on as exclusively
their own are despicable.

~~~
7952
In software development I tend to believe that the idea is not particularly
valuable. The real value is being able to implement an idea effectively. That
is what makes a great product work.

It is striking how differently the art technicians in this article think. They
see the idea as having all the intrinsic value. More cynically I wonder if it
is really the marketing value of a big name rather than the quality of ideas
that count. A great idea by an art student is far less valuable than a great
idea from a famous painter or sculptor.

~~~
lizardskull
“Very little is actually about execution, because the execution's primary
purpose is to represent the idea. It's the actual idea that contains the
values.” This quote from the article is a strange reflection of what the world
of software development teaches.

~~~
pastage
My take on it is that it is the artist that brings the idea and make it come
to light, they do this by letting other people do the work but they are still
the visionaries and in charge of the execution of art.

Good examples of ideas and execution is plentyfull in both software and art,
just because you get both of them right doesn't mean you will succeed.

~~~
extralego
This just doesn’t represent reality of contemporary art. It’s a bullshitters
game. These artists almost never even have a vision that is important to them.
They behave as such, but the project motivations are consistently reflexive.
They are just a response to what they thing will help their recognition. This
is just not about expression.

Historically, this is extremely wrong. Renaissance artists were the
technicians of course. That’s what they were known for.

This is the rot of an industry built on extracting funds from overly wealthy
patrons with no limit to the amount of dishonesty.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Renaissance artists were the technicians of course. That’s what they were
known for."_

That's only partially true.

While Renaissance masters usually had the skill to execute a fully finished
work, and probably did so during their own apprenticeship, by the time they
became masters they often had workshops of dozens or even hundreds of
assistants who did almost all of the work for them. After the work was almost
complete, the master might come in and put on some finishing touches.

There's lots of art out there these days that's misattributed to the master
when it was actually done by one of his assistants in the workshop, whose
training was usually centered around creating art that looked just like the
master's.

------
mattkevan
A few friends have worked as technicians for a very well known British artist.

As far as I can see he pretty much hires every art graduate within a
reasonable radius of his art factory. They do the majority of the production
work, to his specifications. Eventually they get bored and leave to do their
own stuff.

Another guy I know is a sort of 'special projects' consultant for artists,
figuring out particular logistical or engineering challenges. It sounds really
fun.

~~~
jf-
Hirst?

------
Nasrudith
Sounds a lot like academia really and the open secret in many fields that the
graduate "coauthors" were really the ones who did the work and the "main
author" was the do nothing but compensated and credited more professor who
hypocritically starts off every course stating plagiarism will not be
tolerated.

The lack of transparency is what makes both of them bad. It would be one thing
if an established member vouched for someone new as a supervisor to be clear
they followed existing standards of experimentation and research or explicitly
admitted they went from a 1/20th scale model to a granite and steel statue
with modifications because the original was structurally unsound with
different materials.

~~~
briankirby
I actually think it's almost the opposite in my experience as a physicist.
Often graduate students are given the first author position, the position
which indicates the most credit, even though in many ways the graduate student
is closer to a highly skilled technician following the path laid down by their
more experienced professor.

~~~
basiliskparty
The OP is right to raise questions about this in academics.

The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics:

The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people
see the credit that way.

The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the
prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the
last author is kept on lengthy author lists in many. It's because last author
doesn't mean least work anymore. I know a colleague who quietly started
jockeying to be last author on papers because he knew it was almost as/more
prestigious than first.

The grad student is first and the professor is anywhere else but people assume
that it's the profs work because "grad students are just learning" or some
such thing.

The grad student deserves the credit but is second or third or something else
because of power differentials involving all the other authors.

The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea
and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft
and offered some minor feedback.

A coauthor formulating and doing the analyses, without whom the paper could
not exist because they were the ones translating the theories into
quantifiable testable models, are left off the paper because "analyses don't
deserve credit" or something.

Really, anything and everything goes in academics. It's broken. I realize that
there are people/groups who practice with integrity but this is not something
you can assume everywhere. Even when people are trying to have integrity,
weird scenarios develop that have no good solutions.

I think this issue with art technicians vs artists is really a model of many
problems with income inequality in society. The implementation matters. The
people who bring it to fruition matter. They deserve credit and compensation.
Ideas without execution are just ideas. I honestly can't believe we even
entertain the idea that execution is valueless, or that we have discussions
where people fetishize Steve Jobs so much that he's treated as the sole
creator behind the iphone, as if he caused it to materialize out of thin air,
and the previous phones by LG, and the engineers, and designers, and everyone
else are just stupid uncreative hacks who were just following Job's orders
down to the microcircuitry on the chips.

Its fraud and it's rampant in society today. For some reason we're
uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product
is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really
involves many people making small contributions.

[https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-great-man-
parado...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-great-man-paradox/)

~~~
dahdum
> The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea
> and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a
> draft and offered some minor feedback.

> For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every
> innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative
> effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.

These two points seem at odds to each other, why should the professor be given
no credit?

------
oytis
Pretty what should have been expected after we alienated skill from art.

~~~
mattkevan
Skill and art are not necessarily linked. It's possible to be a craftsman
without being an artist, and vice versa.

Think of a fabricator as an OEM. iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn, and I'm
sure their technicians contribute greatly to the manufacturing and design, but
it's still the Apple logo that gets stuck on the back.

~~~
Hendrikto
I wouldn‘t call an iPhone a piece of art though.

~~~
mattkevan
The Design Museum in London has pretty much everything Jony Ive ever designed
in their permanent collection.

They certainly are art in this context.*

And I'd argue that Apple are one of the few tech companies that genuinely view
their products as art objects, as well as being boxes of mass-produced
consumer technology.

* There's a wider question about whether the mere act of displaying something in a gallery _makes_ it art, but its one that many fine art postgrads haven't been able to get to the bottom of yet :)

~~~
flanban
I would argue that the fact it's in a design museum rather than an art museum
makes it design in that context.

Speaking very broadly: Designers manifest other people's ideas for money. Art
is more when you bring your own ideas into the world because you want to.

------
duxup
This seems like one of those severts revealed to stories where it is only a
"secret" to people who don't think about the topic, aren't paying attention,
and for whom it doesn't matter...

I'm by no means an art expert, but I'm surprised that people would be
surprised.

The local TV show that covers artists always shows their assistants and such
working with them and outright producing the art.

When I've gone on visits to artists studios often the assistants are there,
they are all upfront about what they do, and / or the artist talks about who
else they work with (send the concept to others to produce) to make larger
size and quantity pieces depending on the project.

I have never felt there was any attempt to hide any of it...

------
socrates1998
>'I can't believe they're not making that stuff, you're making it, so you're
the artist, not them'. I think that's what the general population thinks.”

Yes, that's sure as hell what I thought. I mean, the whole point of being an
artist is you create the work.

It's a lot less talent to tell someone what to do.

This article left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

------
ArtWomb
Art apprenticeship has existed since Caravaggio's time and beyond. But one
relatively modern phenom is that you don't see artists assistants emerging
after their period of indenture as stars themselves. People tend to get
plucked for glory right out of school. Or they themselves hustle and blow up
via Instagram. But you'll meet plenty of technicians in NYC at least who have
been working in that role for 10+ years. Without emerging with a name or
career of their own.

------
wallflower
Reposting an old comment. The art world obeys supply and demand - where demand
has no relation to the real world. Damien Hirst is a marketing genius. He
needs a factory to build his art, much like Porsche.

If you are more curious about the contemporary art world market and why $29M
is not that expensive[1], I recommend "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The
Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". In general, brand (in this case
Christie's and Sotheby's) ranks supreme above all else. Once you are branded,
you can pretty much sell anything as expensive art. Also, an interesting
factoid - when we hear of Far East/Middle East buyers bidding tens of millions
(or more) for a painting, we naturally tend to think - who buys that without
seeing it - but as the book points out - the painting has most likely gone to
see the buyer already (e.g. Dubai/Hong Kong pre-auction private tour).

Excerpts from the book:

"Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world --
everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such
as Jasper Johns' 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it (currently Michael
Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem
to want to acquire is what economists call positional good; things that prove
to the rest of the world that they really are rich."

Jasper Johns' White Flag

[http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-
this-...](http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-this-l.html)

[http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-
art/1998.329](http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329)

Estimates on the artist economy: "40k artists resident in London (about same
number in NYC)

For London and NYC each: 75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income)

300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income)

5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

[https://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-
Contemporar...](https://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-
Contemporary/dp/0230620590)

[1] "If a great apartment costs $30 million, than a Rothko [big deal famous
contemporary artist] that hangs in the featured spot in the living room can
also be worth $30 million - as much as the value of the apartment. But no one
could envision a $72.8 million apartment to use for comparison..."

------
cafard
Several years ago, the NY Times had an article by a fellow hired to work for
Jeff Koons, who apparently designs but does not produce "his" work, something
well known to those who care. The gig ended in failure, when the piece he was
working on toppled. Koons apparently held no grudge.

Anyway, you could look it up:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/i-was-jeff-
koons...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/i-was-jeff-koonss-
studio-serf.html)

------
scandox
What seems missing here and in the article is the way in which an Artist’s
physical interaction with media affect their ideas - it’s a feedback loop.

I think an Artist with huge experience of certain materials and processes can
readily outsource work but I think an artist working solely in the idea sphere
misses an opportunity for development.

I often think of David Lynch trying and failing to do the Elephant Man makeup
himself and then yielding to a specialist - he must have learned and thought a
lot about what he wanted doing that.

------
thanatropism
The really interesting in this is not the question of authorship (whoever is
paying gets the credit; whomever is getting paid can maybe get gracious
acknowledgement), itś the concept/process duality. I.e.

1) Whether things are fully defined by concepts (and therefore symbolic
representation) or whether there's something to objects that's fundamentally
process-oriented; (this comes closer do Hubert Dreyfus' critique of AI)

2) Whether concepts themselves can be conceived as products of pure ideation,
or whether there is the "concept-making process" of which concept-makers are
technicians (this comes perhaps as a critique of pure conceptual art; for one,
every pure mathematician knows you learn the stuff by doing and acquiring
instincts), and, conversely

3) Whether meaningful things can be produced as pure process, fabrication,
algorithm; or whether there's a necessary conceptual aspect to processes;
whether an artisan carpenter or decades-experienced plumber have a concept
built into their muscle memory and analytic instincts. (This comes close to
programming: why, after so much process-development, is programming still so
much a creators thing?)

------
magic_beans
This is awful, of course, but nothing new. Plenty of painters sold their
students’ work under their own names. Rembrandt is an example:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/arts/design/06rembrandt.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/arts/design/06rembrandt.html)

------
deltron3030
In my opinion, what matters is intent when it comes to wether something can be
considered art or design, not skill. Art is self centered, to please your own
aesthetic sense, design is centered around preferences of other people. If you
e.g. paint to impress others, you're not making art, but design your own
reputation as an "artist".

------
Animats
There used to be cartoons called "The Artist", with a little guy in an
artists's smock. One was titled "Each print was produced under the personal
direction and control of the artist." The artist is shown, hands on hips,
watching an enormous printing press stamping out prints. That's art.

(I once visited a place in Silicon Valley which did just that. I was having
boxes made for boxed software, and went to the printing plant. They had a huge
multicolor press, about a hundred feet long. This could print not just four
colors, but about ten. It could be loaded with inks of different specularity,
so you could get shiny gold ink effects and such. The press was busily
printing collectible art prints, good ones that looked like paintings. About
two per second. The plant mostly did software boxes, but on slow days, they
cranked out art.)

------
analog31
I'm a musician, and a lot of these ideas are familiar. But I wonder if the
music scene is a little bit more mature or realistic (searching for a word
here) about it. A work can go through a lot of different hands before it
reaches an audience. People are fully aware of this. Yes, a few people get
screwed, but others make an honest living as "technicians." It's been a
reasonable side income for me. And except at the superstar level, the
technicians might actually be doing better than the artists, especially if
they can diversify their income sources a bit.

Even the instrument that I play... it bears the name of a master, but there's
no secret about the fact that it was produced in a workshop, as the fiddles
"made" by Stradivarius probably were.

~~~
flanban
More mature or more commercial?

You're talking about making money, but no mention of making music.

A better argument is that art is getting more technical. or even just that's
it's getting physically bigger.

Also, when music is commercial it's still called music.

Art stops being art when it's made for money. It becomes illustration, design,
decoration or some such thing.

Historically a lot of EU or American artists are pretty much trust fund kids.
because if you need to think about money all the time... you can't make art.
Art requires some modicum of genuine freedom and most people need money to
find it.

I'm not sure how that works for music.

~~~
msla
> Historically a lot of EU or American artists are pretty much trust fund
> kids. because if you need to think about money all the time... you can't
> make art. Art requires some modicum of genuine freedom and most people need
> money to find it.

And this is why "Art For Art's Sake" was invented when the middle class began
to encroach on the upper class's ownership of art and the ability to make it.
After all, if your social inferiors can do something, is it really special?
No. So either abandon it, or define it to be something those people can't do
after all.

------
bazinga56
to quote Modest Mouse

"All them eager actors / gladly taking credit / For the lines created / by the
people tucked away from sight"

It applies to companies as well.

~~~
msla
> "All them eager actors / gladly taking credit / For the lines created / by
> the people tucked away from sight"

These days, in the sway of the auteur theory, it's more the director taking
credit for the whole show, at least in the minds of critics.

Apparently, movies need authors, and the director was chosen as being
authorial. Movies with one author ( _The Room_ ) are seen as being better than
movies which were collaborations ( _Citizen Kane_ ) as the former are more
tractable to the modern critical theories.

------
fb03
I believe that art comes from ideas, and sometimes you do need a helping hand
to help them come out. Credit should still be given accordingly.

Example: Grab an album by Steve Vai (you should check him out if you don't
know his music, btw)... somewhere in the album booklet you're gonna see a
mention of the band members that helped him perform the music that he wrote.

What we are seeing here imho is the mixed case between hip hop (where every
collab and participation is featured, to oblivion) and ghost writing in
songwriting and fiction (where no one ever appears or gets credit). It's a
good thing some 'ghost artists' are coming out and revealing this stuff.

------
sunstone
This has been going on for a long time. If I'm not mistaken when Michelangelo
did the Sistine Chapel he would outline the major forms but he had a lot of
assistants to fill in the details. So he conceived the design, drew that
design on the ceiling (and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff) but the entire
work did not "come from the hand of the artist"

To my mind it's about the idea and conception of the work. And when the
technician improves the design or idea then that's when it moves into being a
collaboration.

------
psergeant
This is basically the plot (in my opinion, anyway) of Exit Through the Gift
Shop

------
onemoresoop
This is interesting but nothing new. As an artist I find the process and the
intimacy with it as the most valuable part, that's where I learn and grow
most. And the physical connection gives me most pleasure. I wouldn't get much
value out of barking out orders and specifications to other artist
technicians. On the other hand artist technicians need to eat too and it's
okay that they get some work. It's embarrassing that they get no credit though
but we know that is a facet of the human nature, it happens in almost every
field

------
andosteinmetz
Much of the discussion here revolves around whether or not the artist deserves
credit for creating a work if it was fabricated by other people, which I think
somewhat misses the point.

The issue, I think, lies in the lack of shared credit that's granted in the
art world to people whose labor and skills are utilized to realize the work.

Across most of the arts, the work of many artisans, craftspeople, technicians
and workers is poured into the realization of an artwork, and across most of
the arts those people receive some sort of credit. The film industry is maybe
the best example here. In "cinema" the director gets top billing, but ample
credit also goes to the screenwriter, cinematographer, sound designer & so on.

"Fine art" is an exception to the rule and I think this has to do with a
mythology built around the artist that began in the modern era, coinciding
with the movement in European painting from frescoes embedded in architectural
setting to oil on canvas and the advent of the art object as a commodity.
During the modern era and up through modernism, it became much more common for
artists (and painters in particular) to work alone in their studios etc. etc.

Today, the role and scale of art has shifted again, and more craftspeople are
often involved in the production of a single artwork than they were in the
1700s through the 1950s, but the mythology and institutional frames available
remain stuck on the model of the single creator. I think this is just one of
the many contradictions between material realities of contemporary art and the
narratives and markets built around them. Maybe (hopefully) we're beginning to
call some of that into question.

As an artist who has worked for other artists in the role of fabricator, there
is a funny feeling when an artist hasn't touched (much less, seen, in one
case!) the artwork that you've built for them until it's displayed under their
name. In these cases I've never felt personally slighted, but it's weird
knowing that only a subset of people working in the art world - artists,
fabricators, gallerists, etc. - understand how many peoples' work often goes
into making a big ambitious show. I think film-style credits would be an
appropriate acknowledgement and some artists are actually beginning to do
this.

------
pjc50
This is essentially a branding process. Arguably it's just as bad in the tech
industry: did Elon Musk really make that rocket himself? Was Steve Jobs wholly
responsible for the iPhone?

------
pessimizer
Modern art is simply the craft of creating financial instruments, the only
reason it's imbued with all of the imagery of sophistication and insight is
because the people who buy expensive financial instruments like to think of
themselves as sophisticated and insightful.

There's no difference between collecting fine art and collecting stamps. A
stamp may be pretty, but its purpose is to be scarce, difficult to copy, and
to have a clear provenance from a known issuer.

------
extralego
I have done 2 of these projects for contemporary artists. I have never
experienced so many broken promises in one short period before in my life.
Disgusting people.

------
fredophile
I remember learning some unexpected facts at a Rodin exhibit several years
ago. For sculptures that will be cast in metal or similar materials there is a
set number of castings, I think it was 5, that can be made from a single mold
and all be considered original. These castings can be made at any time, even
after the artists death. This means you can have a sculptor die and still have
original works being produced for several years.

------
DaveSapien
Simon is a friend and he's one of the chillest and professional guys I know.
He makes furniture and whole shop/office/room set ups that are fantastic. A
true master craftsman. If you're into interior design porn his instagram is
worth a look
[https://www.instagram.com/simon_harlow/?hl=en](https://www.instagram.com/simon_harlow/?hl=en)

------
cbcbxxx
The value of art today (and since the rise of avant-gardism) is highly
contingent on context, the positioning of an object/gesture/operation within x
context.

This article is essentially addressing the classic 'art vs. craft' question.
From the perspective of art history, the technician, here, is not understood
as the artist. She is understood as a skilled laborer who will be properly
remunerated upon completion of her work (regardless if the work sells).

The other individual is understood to be the artist because it is she who 1)
had the initial will/reason to make the work, 2) conceived of the idea and the
object-form that this idea would take, 3) will assume risk for the work even
if it 'fails,' and it is through _her_ history of production (and not that of
the technician's) that the work will be valued and possibly historicized.

The canonical reference for the 'art vs. craft' question is Duchamp, who in
1914 presented his "Bottle Rack" as his art (an industrially produced rack for
drying bottles) and later his famed "Fountain" (an upside down porcelain
urinal) deeming them "ready-mades."

A more recent example can be found in the work of Jeff Koons. See this
conference from 2008
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbnWJNUtEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbnWJNUtEc)
"The Koons Effect: Fabrication: Between Technology and Craft"

------
kevin_b_er
This has a parallel to startups. You want to make a startup as a technical co-
founder, but you are not the "idea man". Does the "idea man" get all the
credit? Someone else conceptualizes the art and someone else, or many others,
do all the work. Who gets the credit?

------
arty_throwaway
Artist here. An anecdotal example of what the article discusses: an
acquaintance of mine works for arguably the most commercially successful
sculptor/Contemporary Artist in the world. Get him drunk at a dinner party and
he'll talk about his job, which consists of working to create new "forms", by
which he means 3-dimensional shapes, entirely on his own. Once in a while his
employer pops into the studio and says the equivalent of "that one", and then
it gets enlarged, painted, and sold as the exclusive creation of his boss for
millions of pounds. He'll gripe privately about what HN'ers would call "IP",
but he's also got a stable job, definitely at the upper end of what
technicians get paid, and at this point in his life it would be a huge risk to
his family's welfare try to make it on his own as an 'Artist'.

The analogies to a CEO, coach, architect etc will fall down because in none of
those jobs does she, at the end, singularly own the entire physical and
intellectual property of the object created when collaboration is
involved...and of course in many cases there isn't a physical 'object' but
rather a performance, a set of instructions, etc. While that is the point of
the article, I think it's worth highlighting because it changes how an artist
behaves and works with their 'team', hidden or not. It's also representative
of how unusual a field art is. Another example is simply what happens in the
buying and selling of Contemporary Art...investment funds secretly colluding
with galleries to prop up auction prices which they then use as new (inflated)
baselines to sell work to their own clients, members of museum acquisition
boards arranging for their institution to buy works of artists that they
personally own, tax evasion on a massive scale, etc. Conflicts of interest
that might put people in prison in other fields can sometimes be part of my
normal business day.

I like reading HN discussions about art because there are always attempts to
think through an issue from first principles, where those first principles are
some commenter's personal definition of what art 'is'. Artists don't do that.
Trying to argue about what art 'is', amongst artists, generally stops after
your first year in art school because the most popular definitions of art are
self-reflexive (Dickie's "Institutional Definition" is the classic one). This
self-reflexivity of Art implies that the definition of an Artist is also
circular...which I'd suggest makes any sort of 'standard model' of the
accepted behaviour of Artists difficult to pin down. To put it another way: in
my experience, Art tends to be anything on the spectrum between “What Happens”
and "What Someone Will Pay For". How to codify that as a field is nebulous
enough. Now imagine creating, much less enforcing, a set of ethical labour
practices specific to this field. And again, instead of these circularities
being immediately thrown out as they would be in many other disciplines, they
are seen as a part of Art's unique character as a field itself.

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troncjb
I see a lot of "this is the same as my experience with x" where x is CEOs,
Academic paper authors, musicians.

Is it time that we own up to the fact that nobody exists in a vacuum? Can we
skip straight to the socialism part?

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jdietrich
For as long as there have been artists, there have been apprentices. Sometimes
those apprentices went on to become renowned masters, sometimes they
languished in obscurity.

~~~
JamesMcMinn
Except that's not even remotely the issue being discussed here.

This is about artists going to people who are already experts in their field
and having them construct the art, but taking (or being given) all of the
credit for it.

~~~
jdietrich
It's exactly what's being discussed here. Historically, this kind of operation
is the norm rather than the exception. If you walk around the Louvre or the
Met, a large proportion of what you see will have been painted largely or
wholly by an apprentice or assistant. Many Renaissance and Baroque masters ran
something akin to a factory, with each painting being the product of several
artists specialising in a particular task. The idea of art as the personal
product of a singular genius is largely a work of romantic mythology,
continued into the present day as marketing puffery for the art industry.

Are you morally outraged that Marc Jacobs does not personally cut and sew
every garment bearing his name? Are you shocked to learn that many pop stars
are entirely unable to write, produce or play music?

~~~
JamesMcMinn
> It's exactly what's being discussed here.

No, it's not. There is no training being given. These are not apprentices
learning how to create art, they are skilled professionals carrying out work
that the artist themselves is often incapable of. An apprentice learns their
skills from their master and could be seen as a creation of the master, art
technicians are simply there to do the work.

> Are you morally outraged that Marc Jacobs does not personally cut and sew
> every garment bearing his name? Are you shocked to learn that many pop stars
> are entirely unable to write, produce or play music?

No, and I never said I was outraged at the art technicians not getting credit,
since they themselves are certainly don't seem to be. However there the public
perception is that the artist who gets the credit is the one who did the
majority of the work when this if often not the case.

