When you work on your own. You define your own rules, you use your own language. You can make something brilliant or worthless. You may reach other people. They could use your software or enjoy your art. Don't put too much hope on it.
When you develop something for known client or clients. You can and have to conversate, you have to make common vocabluary. Both parties will influence the result. This is common in software and not as visible in art.
When one is going to sell its artworks, they will have to go long way to assure that they respect assumptions of audience. Quality, associations, clichés. Most of time you'll have to speak language of your clients. And it's hard to hide behind interface or façade as you can do in software.
You make your product for imaginary audience. You think you'll know what other people will think, feel or buy. If you fail, nobody suffers.
I mean customer as someone who is usingfeelinginterpreting the act of art or peace of software. If there is noone (even not oneself), we can not talk something we don't know about.
I dunno--I don't think art really jibes with the "customer" model. Emily Dickinson's customers? (Yikes!) I guess I'm one of those radicals who thinks that art is not necessarily intended to produce entertainment value; rather, to change one's way of perceiving the world--sometimes with both a bang and a whimper. An artist's success may be imperceptible to a market economy; Stravinsky's Rite of Spring induces riots in Paris, Van Gogh labors for years as an object of ridicule. But this gets us off track; the similarities between software design & art that we're discussing are in their production, yes? Not their reason for being?--JanetHolmes
It's interesting, but is it art?
It's artistic, but will it sell?
It's marketable, but who cares?
JanetHolmes knows much more about art than I do, but I wonder whether the equivalent of customers for artists isn't the audience—whether that be a purchaser, a reader, other artists, or the self (or some part of the self best not named). Perhaps programming is not the best model of science here, but what of the physicist? Who is her or his "customer"; who is the audience? -rpg
Setting the money aside, what does that do to customer definition? Is it valid anymore?
"Struggling" artist is almost a redundancy: one assumes a career artist struggles to make ends meet and even feed and clothe themselves. They pursue their art nonetheless because they are driven to do so. Sometimes at the "moment of truth" in software I'll marvel (only half cynically) that "it's more than a job: it's a calling." Other times I'll muse that, if ever I had a state lottery win followed by some irresponsible excess, I'd probably get bored and end up doing something not altogether dissimilar from what I'm doing today. Certain callings have the money while others don't. Artists are at one end of the spectrum, scientists generally in the middle, and plumbers and corporate lawyers (and other trades) at the other end.
Are "customer" and "calling" opposed, aligned, or indifferent?