All artists should read this- Funny ad on Craig's List

[ray245]

P.S. society itself has continually, in every single form it has ever existed, gone against what you say. Art is real work - skilled work, and it has always been valued as such. Your self-lacerating dehumanising modernism belongs in a world of pollution and the death of the human spirit. What the fuck is the point in living in a world where there is no time to waste? Life is only worth living when you can waste it with the people you love in the way you like. Pleasure time has been constantly eroded in the endless search for growth and ever-increasing production. You can go get fucked if you want more. Everyone likes entertainment, likely, everyone needs it to stay sane, thus its value is as real as anything else in human priorities. Work is an indignity we have to suffer to get entertainment as a reward. Entertainment is a particular form of labour tailored towards people in their downtime. Life isn't about production, it's about seeking more time to waste.

Won't art exist as long as a human society exist? A person might not be trained as an artist, but he or she can still beautify things.

I think a better question that should be asked is whether the quality of the art justify the price tag. Why should some artist be more recongised and be more respected for drawing something that no one can understand and putting his work up in in a mueseum as opposed to an illustrator that draw helpful pictures in diagram?

[AniThyng]

Won't art exist as long as a human society exist? A person might not be trained as an artist, but he or she can still beautify things.

I think a better question that should be asked is whether the quality of the art justify the price tag. Why should some artist be more recongised and be more respected for drawing something that no one can understand and putting his work up in in a mueseum as opposed to an illustrator that draw helpful pictures in diagram?

I am willing to bet that the cheapskates that the OP rails against would have no problem shelling out for a painting from a modern art gallery if it was to decorate their own wall in their living room. And yes, one can beautify things even if one is not an artist. At that point one might find that it sucks compared to that done by a professional. The OP objects people thinking it's not real work so they can just ask them to do it for free. If it's "not work" do it youself then!

In any case, yes, indeed, we perhaps suffer from an overabundance of overvalued art in art galleries of astounding pretentiousness, but I suppose you might want to ask yourself: when you visit a city as a tourist, what is it you want to see? No one goes to visit the industrial park...and even you did, odds are there is some building designed by an architect, which is really art + civil engineering.

[Simplicius]

I think a better question that should be asked is whether the quality of the art justify the price tag. Why should some artist be more recongised and be more respected for drawing something that no one can understand and putting his work up in in a mueseum as opposed to an illustrator that draw helpful pictures in diagram?

The price of art is necessarily a very subjective thing. When it's art for art's sake, the price is set by how much the artist values the work & how much everyone else likes it. When it's art for a practical purpose, other things enter the picture like clients' budgets, industry pricing, etc.

As for recognition, consider the difference: Joe Painter is the sole creator of his work. His market for sales/commissioned works is society at large, so he promotes himself to the public to generate interest/word-of-mouth/future sales or commissioned works. Jane Graphic Designer creates the work, but on contract for someone else, who ultimately owns the product. Her market is not the public at large, but rather the pool of prospective clients who want her graphic design services. It is valuable to her to be known professionally, even if she never becomes a household name - and as long as her clients are the IP holders of her work, she can't associate herself with them in the same way a painter can with his own paintings. (Or, she works for a graphic design firm & her firm, rather than herself, garners recognition for the work its designers do.)

Illustrators/designers/'practical' artists do get recognition if their work is distinctive/they are prolific (example) or if there is historical/cultural interest in their work and it is available to be examined as art (example).

ps Sketchbook, feel free to come back if you have an actual argument to make. There's room for that here, and obviously a wealth of points for you to address now. It's just your 'hurf artists should get real jobs' attitude that doesn't belong, because a.) it's dumb posturing when you've got no argument behind it, and b.) doesn't make a lick of sense when people have been able to make a living as artists - not even for practical purposes - through the entirety of recorded history. That makes art a 'real job,' no?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

OS has previously admitted to being someone who did shitty in math and science in school despite wanting to do well and ended up an art major for lack of anything better to do at the time, and now hates himself for not having gotten into engineering school and takes it out on the major he meandered into since he wasn't good enough for the one he wanted. In short we can dismiss this as the whiny shit of someone who wasn't good enough for engineering and probably isn't good enough to make it as an artist, either, but takes out the former failure on the later career path. "I am a subhuman, so everyone else in my job is a subhuman too, but at least I'm being a good bitch which makes me slightly better than them" covers every single post he makes when this subject comes up.

Anyway it's all bullshit. One of my ex's is a brilliant artist and I valued her as my equal without reservation. I was concerned for her future because her art might not prosper as such things to me seem essentially random, but she was very hard working at self-promotion and extremely good at what she did, and faithfully chased every contract she could get. Smart, resourceful, deeply creative, but also a good businesswoman and she deserves to be famous. And for some reason I didn't find her any less of a human than an engineer. Jesus christ, Sketchbook, our society is not caste based, nor should it be. Writers and painters and sculptors and so on are engineers of the human soul and even in a dry, technocratic meritocracy we'd need them to encourage, motivate, and inspire the scientists and engineers. You know what I do when I'm studying my hard-as-shit engineering homework so I can go out and be useful? I LISTEN TO MUSIC. Without that music, I would easily get distracted on other things, and would not study my homework and would never become an engineer. And end up broke, homeless, and shooting myself or something else similarly grim. Before labs when waiting for the teacher/TA, I'd pace back and forth singing Warren Zevon's Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner to calm myself and focus my mind before getting down to work. Which I couldn't have done unless Zevon had written and sung the song and sold it.

Or how does real work get done without the working songs, the cable songs and the marching songs, the pumping shanties and the capstan shanties, to calm and focus the mind to the rhythm of work ? Here I am the engineer, and you the artist--and it's I who stands to defend the fact we should stop trying to make the working environment artificial. But according to you, every singer from Zevon to Beethoven to Stan Rogers was apparently a useless next-to-subhuman. Well, without that music, I'd never have learned to cope with spending twelve hours with my books open every day of the week. So instead of yapping this self-hating bullshit, why don't you put your mouth to a better use catching some flying dicks?

[Broomstick]

OS has previously admitted to being someone who did shitty in math and science in school despite wanting to do well and ended up an art major for lack of anything better to do at the time, and now hates himself for not having gotten into engineering school and takes it out on the major he meandered into since he wasn't good enough for the one he wanted.

Apparently not good enough for the one he ended up in, either.

[AniThyng]

OS has previously admitted to being someone who did shitty in math and science in school despite wanting to do well and ended up an art major for lack of anything better to do at the time, and now hates himself for not having gotten into engineering school and takes it out on the major he meandered into since he wasn't good enough for the one he wanted.

Apparently not good enough for the one he ended up in, either.

I suppose the horse is all but flogged to death, but I guess he expected some of the engineering types on the board to come over and say "hear hear" at his first post... I mean, we're so under-appreciated!

I too, am "something of an artist". That avatar over there <---. yep. By my own hand.

As one can see, I'll keep my day job

[salm]

I don´t undestand how engineers are underapreciated. At least around here they´ve got a pretty good reputation as well as pretty good salaries.

[Simplicius]

I can see where that comes from, at least in the US - engineers and scientists don't have much of a pop-culture presence, and when they do there is a lot of stereoptyping (nerds/mad science/whiz-kid fake "engineering").

Artists may have more popular visibility, but it's not like it's a great image either - they're either "starving," "tortured," or "kooky kooks living the high kooky life." As a profession they don't get much respect at all - as in Kodiak's link, as in people like Sketchbook, as in Republicans slavering to cut the NEA or public school districts shitting on arts programs when budget-cut time rolls around.

[General Zod]

I can see where that comes from, at least in the US - engineers and scientists don't have much of a pop-culture presence, and when they do there is a lot of stereoptyping (nerds/mad science/whiz-kid fake "engineering").

Artists may have more popular visibility, but it's not like it's a great image either - they're either "starving," "tortured," or "kooky kooks living the high kooky life." As a profession they don't get much respect at all - as in Kodiak's link, as in people like Sketchbook, as in Republicans slavering to cut the NEA or public school districts shitting on arts programs when budget-cut time rolls around.

All you really have to do is look around Craigslist to see how little value people give artists, like the op says. Honestly it's downright insulting when you see a lot of ads wanting a significant amount of work or professional quality work and they don't even offer to pay for so much as expenses. Especially when they use a misleading description like claiming they're a renowned or influential company.

[salm]

Hmm... all right they don´t have much of a pop culture presence but there are other other ways of appreciation than through pop culture.
I´d guess that most parents would be pretty happy to hear that their daughter marries an engineer. On the other hand, if she married an artist, maybe not so much.

[Kodiak]

Artists may have more popular visibility, but it's not like it's a great image either - they're either "starving," "tortured," or "kooky kooks living the high kooky life." As a profession they don't get much respect at all - as in Kodiak's link, as in people like Sketchbook, as in Republicans slavering to cut the NEA or public school districts shitting on arts programs when budget-cut time rolls around.

That's one of the big things I'm getting at is the lack of respect for artists. My wife and I went to the same university for the same amount of time and both graduated with Bachelor's Degrees in our respective fields. Hers being a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation & Illustration - a program which graduates roughly 20 students annually due to difficulty - gets far less respect than my Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering which graduates at least 10 times that amount. Everyone in society tends to lump "artists" together in a single category which encompasses professionals with doctorates in art and numerous awards and notebook doodlers like OS.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Serious art is hard work. Even though technically I could master a variety of media, I could never be a professional artist because there's no way I'd have the discipline to make myself productive enough to support myself financially. It doesn't help that my preferred style is obsessively fussy and permanently unfinished due to meandering ideas as the work progresses. But at least in architecture/civil engineering I'll have something of an outlet aside from my personal pet projects at home. People who succeed in art as work are worthy of respect.

Now as for artists who look down on anything connected with practicality, I have little interest in those. Though I suspect the more egregious offenders tend to be art critics and writers rather than significant artists themselves. Though, believe it or not, some of those people are really quite useful in putting art and society in perspective. (Mostly I read about architectural design; the other arts have interest to me primarily as they are incidental to architecture). In particular, I recommend reading books by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner for giving an excellent synopsis of art and architecture through the centuries. I probably learned more history reading his and other art history books than I did in actual history classes, which are admittedly rather pathetic here.

For some real irony, read Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked, as well as any books containing criticism of modern/international style architects from the 20th century, Mies van der Rohe in particular. He is such an artistic hypocrite. In his early written works he claims to "reject all aesthetic speculation" and be a purely rational builder. All decoration was banned, and cladding stripped away to reveal the "honest" structure. Yet the owner of the Farnsworth House sued him because the house was unlivable: no openable windows, insufficient heating and cooling, and expensive to maintain. He had decided that all buildings must be a form of universal glass and steel box. Yet this ignores many practical considerations such as privacy, ventilation, passive heating and cooling and effects of the local climate, locally available materials and their economics, lifetime energy costs, etc. And why? Ultimately to satisfy his own aesthetic choices. It was more important to appear rational, that is cold, industrial, and unconcerned with human emotion or frailty, than to put a lot of thought into all these aspects of use.

The point of this little rant is that it is impossible to fully rid ourselves of aesthetically influenced choices, and that trying to do so just leads us to imposing an aesthetic that we won't admit is nearly as arbitrary as the most whimsical, if cheaper than the most opulent. We cannot live without art because we will continue to invent it even if we try to deny it. So we might as well pay to have good art if we're going to have art anyway. If we do not value ourselves enough to pursue delight, why should we bother persisting?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

OK, now my 2 bits...

1. If you ask me to spend 4 hours an evening for several weeks to make a detailed 3D model or animation, I would expect some cash for that. Would you work 150 hours for nothing? If you had spent years learning how to do it you wouldn't need me to do it for you, so pay up or shut up. Art need not be a factor, hours of work of any kind costs you.

2. Some artists definitely devalue art in the eyes of the public. Tracy Emin comes to mind, but most modern art or installation artists are tarred with the same brush. They tend to bring out high price art that looks like no-skill scams when compared to skilled artists who take hours to create images that even the general public can see took great skill. Calling your shitty bedroom 'art' and demanding 5 figure sums for it shows you for the twat you are.

3. Art isn't the only victim here. I constantly get people asking me to spend hours fixing their PCs or networks, and think a bottle of rum is fine for recompense. I had it with a plumber, and when I asked him what he would charge a neighbour for a 4 hour 'homer' he still wanted £30 an hour. When asked what the difference was, his reply was the classic 'but you know how to do it'. So his skills and training are worth more than mine because...? I guess brains are not valued but brawn is.

[adam_grif]

You get a fair bit of elitism and anti-intillectual ballocks from people doing a trade with respect to jobs that aren't physically exerting. Related to the idea of "an honest days work" (whatever that's supposed to mean), no doubt.

I've given my sister a bit of flak for doing an arts degree (not fine arts, just regular arts), and the Science department has a few nicknames for the B.A., such as "Bugger All" and "Bachelor of Attendance". It's all in good fun of course.