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estebanana -> RE: Guitar prices (Nov. 17 2012 18:37:36)
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Actually Anders I've seen worse undercutting in the construction trade and much less job security.
In fine home building and remodel work, there is a customer who is going to give you what you ask for, and there a is customer who will beat your price down to nothing if you let them. I learned along time ago to just walk away when they start doing that. However if you are up against the wall you have to do the work and take the scraps they offer you because they know you are hard up. There are people in the world who will wait until times are tough and then get good carpenters to work for very little because they know they can.
There are also other guys on jobs who will try to learn how much you are charging and go to the customer and offer to charge less. They will grab the job for a lower fee and when your back is turned they will also steal your power tools or drive a screw into the side wall of your trucks tire. Other guitar makers can be annoying at times, but I've never had this problem with competitive guitar makers.
Guitar making is light weight compared to many other labor jobs. In 2008 the housing bubble broke here in the US and I was building guitars at night and doing remodel work during the day. I had been doing that for nearly ten years learning my stuff. Before that I worked in a museum as an exhibition tech, exhibit builder/designer. That work dropped off around 1999- due to the dot com bubble bursting. I had been doing that since grad school in 1994. The curators were usually not as knowlegable as they thought they were and as a lower tiered person in a museum organization you have to take lot of blows to your ego because the only thing that separates a smart well trained art history major and studio artist from a curator is a title on a desk or office door and a few donor/money connections.
They will pick their old school buddies to do shows even if that person is a total hack. They will buy paintings for the museum for the mass public attraction value not the artistic merit. You just have to _bow your head_ literally, to the dumb authority and design an alcove to show a piece of junk that should be thrown in the dust bin. Mean while you know artists who work during the day and paint at night who draw and paint better than the bad artists your curator is as,s kissing. There are a lot of great curators, don't get me wrong, but there are as many bad ones as good ones and they order people around who are usually much smarter and art saavy than they are.
Enter what I call the "Art Industrial Complex", and main it's situation I call the "Circle of Butt Sniffers"-
The academic teaching aspect of the Circle of Butt Sniffers: The schools today treat good art teachers or any teacher for that matter, like temp workers. Case in point to underscore the insecurity of an academic position. I have a friend who is a great, great painter, he was a professor of mine at the San Francisco Art Institute. His name is Agustin, he's from Chile and he came to the US in 1972 to get away from being killed by Pinochet. ( Perochet) He worked as a house painter in New Jeresy for a bull necked Spaniard who paid him crap wages. He eventually moved to SF finished his art degree and began show his work an teaching here and there.
The school hired him for a few semesters and then let him go, even though he was respected by the other faculty and he produced great students. The reason he was let go was because if the school would have kept him on for another semester they would have been contractually obligated to give him a tenured position and full benefits. Why would they keep him on when they could fire him let him get 12 months unemployment and hire another good artist to grind through and then do the same thing to that teacher?
He picked himself back up and a few years later was able to network into teaching two classes per week at UC Berekley art dept. a shoe in for tenure and secure job. After three and half years of being a good teacher who the students adored he was let go, reason? Same as before, the UC system would have had to offer him benefits if he had taught one more semester. So even though he had a job he did not have benefits, those would only have been granted later if he was given tenure. This happened again at College of Marin a few years after that in the late 2000's.
Academia is a racket that uses up talent and spits it out like it was trash. The ones who get tenured positions are either very, very lucky or talentless fops who endlessly jocky for political reasons with the administration. It is an intellectual Circle of Butt Sniffers meritocracy.
Agustin is around 70 now and he lives simply and with very little money, but he shows his work and is his own guy.
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We've all been though this ringer if we have stuck in the art, guitar, music world. We choose this for ourselves and for better or worse this is who we are. The ones who win are the ones who don't quit when it gets tough. You just soldier on and do you work whether your back hurts or not. I get the feeling it's pretty much the same if you work for a corporation. I don't think artists are better than other people, but fully committed artists should get a nod of recognition for putting out works that make others have a more interesting and better life.
There is a difference between somebody who paints every other Sunday and someone who paints every night after working a job that requires them to answer phones and give angry customers information about consumer electronics. Asn sometimes even if we've supported ourselves by being a full time artist we might have to get back into the other job markets to make thing work until we can arc to another cycle of full time art self employment.
The thing that is annoying that you really have to forebear with grace, and it is difficult, are the newcomers who have not been though the first cycle of 'making it' and then having to go back to another job. It happens over and over in the arts professions and there is no shame in it. It is admirable actually to see artists determined to not let anything knock them down, even a bad economy. It is painful, not fun, but in the end certain of us can't live like a boneless filleted fish, we have to do this shiet if it kills us.
When I was a kid of about eight or ten I used to grab the family lawn mower out of the garage, push it down the street and call out that I was mowing lawns that day for money. Eventually if I pushed far enough some man or woman would see me through the front window and come running out holding a five dollar bill saying "Young man! Young man! Over here, please mow the lawn and do the edges neat and I'll tip you." The guitar making transaction is basically the same thing. It's much simpler than many other things.
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