The post is very misleading because it's not about absolute cost of living, you should also suggest data for other towns where an artist could have lived, for example some small town in Ohio.

If Patti Smith lived somewhere in Colorado mountains to do her thing, she probably wouldn't be where she is today. Artists require audience, and cities like New York have them, ready to spend money. That's why people moved to New York, and "created their scene". They would have never been able to "create their own scene" in a farm town with population of 300.

That said, it makes more sense nowadays since we now have Internet. I think you can just live wherever is the cheapest and work on your art (could be an actual piece of art or even a business) since we have the Internet.

But it's wrong to say the artists "created their scene" in New York. New York was the only place they could have "created their scene" back then.

It's a fair point that the only way for these artists to have become successful in a significant way at the time was to move to a town like New York that can supply the necessary patronage, but I'm not sure that I'd characterize the post as "very misleading".

Even with the city's money, the artists still did have to do the legwork to create a scene that was worthy of investment. Rich people aren't gullible saps who will be parted from their fortune at the first opportunity.

An artist also shouldn't have to be as wildly successful as Patti Smith to be considered a success. Other cities of high culture like Berlin have also fostered incredible art scenes over the last few decades, and without the overflowing capital of NY. Few of those artists made it big, but many did achieve comfortable lifestyles of more modest means, and I think we could say that they "created their scene".

Relevant quote from the article:

> The idea is that you live somewhere cheap, keep your overhead low, make whatever work you want to make, create your own scene. Nobody gets super-rich or super-famous, but dammit, they get to live their lives their own way, unbeholden to anybody.

You know,, Berlin is the capital city of Germany, so your Berlin example exactly supports my point. People who are motivated to succeed naturally flock to a city with access to the largest audience, as long as they can afford it, since that raises your chance of success.

I was just pointing out this Patti Smith person is completely mistaken about what made herself successful, she thinks it's all her doing but she's forgetting she was at the right place at the right time (and of course with the right content she provided). My whole argument is if you compare larger cities with any other smaller towns, everything is easier (only drawback is money), and that's why people naturally flock to larger cities. My argument has nothing to do with whether legwork is necessary or not, it's just about how people can only create "scenes" where it makes sense. It's delusional to think that they could have created it anywhere else.

Right, Berlin is the capital of Germany, but the reason I brought it up as a counterexample for New York is that the Cold War and aftermath left it economically depressed for decades. Until quite recently, rents there were very cheap (on all kinds of interesting spaces), and the art scene flourished.

(And meta note: thank-you for editing your post to be more civil. It looks like your account is relatively new, so I'm going to leave a link here to HN comment etiquette in case you haven't seen it before [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think art has existed and will exist no matter how shitty the situation is. I'm not even arguing New York is better than Germany. This is where I think there was a misunderstanding, because I've been just talking about how "creating a scene" is not something you can just do anywhere, it has nothing to do with money and has everything to do with population and audience.

To create a scene, you go to a concentrated enough place to gather people. Why would anyone decide to go to middle of nowhere and try to create a group of like minded people? (Again, i'm talking about the past, I do think it is possible nowadays with the Internet)

When you say rents were very cheap and depressed in Berlin, I doubt that it was cheaper or more depressed than other parts of Germany. Where would German artists go for larger population? Berlin. Unless you think german artists should have and could have created a "scene" from a smaller town in germany, I don't think we are disagreeing about anything.

While that's true, I think comparing the East Village back then to the East Village today isn't sufficient to claim that the entire city is too expensive today. Maybe a less drastic approach is fine - instead of "find a new city" which cuts you off from all the resources & audiences only found in a place like NY, just find a new neighborhood.