pranav / condur

whoever planted this romantic idea in SF techbros that engaging with artists will provide ‘taste’ and more success in ‘consumer AI’ and ‘narrative’ stories needs to be held to account for the irreparable damage they have done. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but this archetype of artist just doesn’t exist in the real world, or atleast not at the rate they would need to , to generate value at any meaningful scale. Case in point, London has a remarkable density of the best art schools (I went to one of them and love art to just get that out of the way), galleries etc. but this hasn’t necessarily translated into a winning consumer AI story or tasteful AI or whatever, because why would it? Most artists are domain experts and the domain is not as broad as ‘art’ in general and does not necessarily have transferable skills (more on that later) they are often hyper specialists. A serious painter’s practice often tells the same stories, usually their own or adjacent to their individual geographies, stories etc. so they have not honed storytelling as much as they have honed telling a specific story (and maybe two / three others in a particular lexical field) multiple times. Secondly, to build a serious practice and deep relationships with collectors, galleries, curators etc. there is almost an active disincentive to deviate significantly from this lexical field. The market doesnt reward novelty and telling a new story every few years as much as it does building a consistent brand and adding to an existing story. Artists are famously zoomed in on their own story and practice to the point that there are entire careers (curating, sales, exhibition design etc.) to enable them to keep that hyper specific focus and keep the cashcow that is their artistic practice, healthy. A painter’s skillset is barely any use to a sculptor so why would they be much use to a forward deployed engineer? We haven’t even gotten to the point that artists dont want to work with tech people and their ways of working would be considered extremely difficult and unprofessional. But even if they did, what would they do? Most of fine art is meant for a different and tiny audience and rareified by design, its the same reason you dont see artists doing interior design or product design, it is perhaps the few skillsets that is truly non-transferable. Even if it did transfer, a great artists could very well be a mediocre curator or tastemaker, it isnt a straight line. Artists are ironically not the best people to articulate their own practice and make it legible to different audiences hence the plethora of characters needed to enable a serious practice. Artists have a point of view and a strong conviction but i dont know that this is the kind of ‘taste’ a payroll software needs to stop rolling out slop across their comms, graphics or internal processes. I think you need a third kind of person entirely but looking to artists seems very directionally off for reducing slop even if thats the intuitive first choice for most