demobot

ipgd:

bouquetofknives:

ipgd:

artist-confessions:

*$9 because the texture abuse raises the price by two dollars.

Wouldn’t you rather spend your money on art that you’d like to look at?

Art by http://saccharinescorpion.tumblr.com/

submitted by -orangeaipom

if this picture took less than an hour to draw, $7 is about the bare minimum level of  reasonable compensation. if it took the artist any longer than that, they are being underpaid for the amount of time they spent.

why are people constantly fucking bitching and crying about artists getting paid “too much” for their skilled labor, while nobody ever pitches a fit about the fact you can make $8.81 an hour standing in front of a door and saying hello to people

do people even have any concept of how little minimum wage actually is? even a full time minimum wage job is going to get you 1200-1500 dollars a month tops, and most positions that hire at minimum wage are going to be part time to avoid having to actually give you any benefits like health insurance (and freelance artists still have to pay for their own health insurance even when they’re working well over 40 hours a week, which is exorbitantly fucking expensive to buy individually). go look at craigslist for the prices of renting apartments in your area and see how comfortable a life you’ll have working 8 dollars an hour when you factor in the prices of food, transportation, taxes, the out-of-pocket medical bills you’ll have to pay, clothes, etc.. even if you cram yourself into apartment with a billion other people it can be hard

nobody ever argues that walmart greeters don’t deserve to make the bare minimum living wage for the work that they do because for some reason people believe training an ability for your whole fucking life and then spending countless hours creating individualized pieces to the specification of your commissioners is easier and of less value to society than saying hello to people who walk into a walmart

it’s fucking ILLEGAL to pay a walmart greeter 7 dollars for an hour of work, and yet people will sneer at an artist who doesn’t want to work at a $2/hr wage

i don’t care if an artist is hawking terrible weeaboo pictures of his fucking shitty naruto OCs rubbing their massive inflated lactating jugs all over each other, he is entitled to set his price at the minimum wage. you don’t have to buy art that you don’t like, but getting indignant over an artist expecting the most basic grade of compensation for the time spent makes you the worst kind of garbage shit trash

I’m all for art. I’ve taken art classes for more than 10 years. I’ve sold art to make money on multiple occasions. I’m more or less an artist. That being said, the economic illiteracy of this post is astounding. Welcome to Economics 101 with a focus in capitalism.

Where do I even start.

Free markets. In a free market, the price at which something is sold is determined by the supplier and the consumer. In economics, each consumer values things differently, and is willing to spend money however they see fit. That means if someone things that a drawing is worth their 7 dollars, they’ll buy it. If not, they won’t.

The value of their money is determined by the opportunity cost. That means the next best thing they could have done with their money. Seven dollars has gotten me jeans on sale. It’s gotten me dinner. It’s gotten me bandages to last those 2 weeks when my leg was bleeding profusely after I injured myself.

If someone already has all the stuff they need and they want to add art to their gallery, cool. But you don’t get to police people’s preferences or how much they value their dollar. People will value art as they wish. You can’t do much with art. It’s nice, but you just fucking look at it. It’s a luxury. As a broke college student, I’d rather buy my bandages and lunch, thank you.

Walmart elects to hire people for minimum wage because they see that the benefit of the labor of these employees is equal to or higher than the wage they give them. Walmart decides that to them, greeters are worth minimum wage. If not, they wouldn’t hire greeters. They don’t have to hire greeters.

People pay for art when they see that the value they get from art is greater than or equal to the money they put in. This is basic economics.

People are not corporations. People are going to value their $8.81 much differently than a fucking corporation is. You can’t compare the two.

Minimum wage is a socialist concept and an arbitrary number designated by Congress. Artists have the right to put their art at this arbitrary number but just because it’s “minimum wage” doesn’t mean anything. That number is artificial. It’s invented. It’s meaningless, and the proof is that households with 2 parents on minimum wage still can’t make ends meet and have to live on welfare. Don’t use it as a landmark for anything.

You’re right, though. No one has to buy art. Artists are entitled to charge what they want. But let’s get over this socialist mentality of “deserve.” Yes, art is hard and takes skill and labor and I wish there was more appreciation for it, but the only thing that determines what the art is “worth” in terms of monetary value is how much the market is willing to pay for it.

Artists can set their prices at whatever and I’m not going to sneer at anyone or be indignant but if people are not going to buy whatever Naruto OC art you were talking about, they’re not going to buy it and artists shouldn’t throw hissy fits just because the market doesn’t work in their favor. When you decide to make art for money, your income is dependent on the consumer, and people really need to understand that.

Hence why I’m studying to be an Economics major, not an Art major.

oh, how could i have forgotten all those important lessons fox news taught me? yes, when you call something “socialist”, the black mark of that dirty cursed word immediately washes away all value and intrinsically invalidates the concept. after all, there’s no such thing as a mixed economy — if you allow one socialist policy into the system society instantly devolves into a marxist hellscape where all hard working men are made into the piteous slaves of the freeloading poor!

yes, it is true that the consumer dictates the price of the free market. it’s also true that this individual instance of low pricing is due to the consumer base (largely, teenagers and people with no concept of the value of money who nonetheless find themselves with disposable income to spend on art) being ignorant of the degree of time and work that goes into art, and the basic value of labor in our filthy socialist society. (wage laws exist and are relevant to the cost of living whether you think they’re arbitrary and socialist or not by the way????)

if art isn’t worth more than minimum wage to you, don’t buy it. chances are if you don’t believe art is worth minimum wage to you, even knowing the degree of labor that goes into art, you weren’t fucking buying it in the first place and this rant is wholly fucking irrelevant to you! (apart from, apparently, a podium for you to masturbatorily boast about studying economics?) you even said it yourself — if walmart didnt think greeters were worth 8.81 dollars an hour, they wouldn’t hire them. they wouldn’t reduce their wages below minimum wage, they WOULDN’T HIRE THEM. (let’s just ignore the fact that that is because it is legally mandated of them by wage laws and not that walmart actually has scruples enough to pay its employees a living wage regardless of legal impetus)

if you DO value and spend money on art, and you find the need to castigate an artist for setting a price that is by all accounts below the most base of wages it is even legal to pay an employee, you lack either perspective or empathy. although there’s no cure for being a self-absorbed undergrad in their ayn rand phase, the other can potentially be changed with argument. which is why i am here!!!

ideas also happen to influence the free market! i am not drafting a fucking law to legally force people to pay artists minimum wage. i am putting out a concept for people to consider, which those who read it are free to take as they see fit. if that happens to change how people think about the value of art, that is just as much a function of your lauded “invisible hand” as any other factor that impacts the capricious whims of the market.

i wish all shitposts had this quality.

paxamericana:

paxamericana:

Here’s what the 2012 electoral map would have looked like if only white males had voted. 

Buzzfeed took a stab at this too. They got a slightly different result. In their map, Hawaii, Oregon and DC flip and there is no Maine split. They also examine other scenarios at the link above.

typeverything:

Typeverything.com - 245/365 - The All Day Everyday Project (by Hannes Beer)

Now this negative space is sexy as hell.

today’s mail:

• coupon books
• fliers
• late bill notice oops
• 2/3 of the textbooks!!
• some shitty package—HOLY FUCKING SHIT