Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

This looks more like pursuing Instagramming full time.

Instagram is the marketing channel but you still need to put in the work to have something to promote.

fiddling with printers and plotters isn't the hard part, most likely the marketing part is because anything sells if you find the fools.

The whole stick of this article strikes me as marketing in the first place.

I'm pretty sure you are severely understimating the amount of work that goes into quality art pieces, no matter the medium.

Also, thinking of customers as "fools" only makes sense if you believe you are selling/producing garbage. If what you make has value, then whoever buys it is no fool.

You're also underestimating the amount of great quality art that simply doesn't sell. Hence the power of marketing. And the art that sells for lots and lots of money is also marketing and financial gimmicks the art world does behind the scenes. Unfortunately it's not quality that matters, it's the notoriety of the artist. It goes back to marketing in circles.

Maybe you're overestimating the amount of art in those art pieces!

If someone buys something voluntarily, it's because it holds value for that person, not because they're a fool. The key lies in the 'voluntarily'.

No need to be this jaded IMO. Dude is making art (FWIW, art I quite enjoy), and marketing it accordingly. Just saying he's "Instagramming full time" sounds like unnecessary aspersions - it's not like he's just making duck faces into the camera or showing random shit he bought, and he's not doing some lame "influencer" track. He's just marketing and selling stuff that he created. We should celebrate that, especially on a website like Hacker News.

Perhaps the same can be said of tech.

Oh, absolutely.