[growlist]

In my highly subjective view artists are expecting to get paid for something that most of us have the capability to participate in with reasonable results given a similar investment of effort; in other words, most artists differ from the general population not in artistic aptitude, but rather in the desire to be an artist. I would love to sit around and play with ideas for a living, but it doesn't pay the bills in my occupation.

[bad-joke]

Relatively speaking, the majority of people have the capability to do almost anything. It's only a matter of time and resources.

Natural abilities and genetics can accelerate the learning process, yes, but accelerated mastery is really only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within your lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline.

What I'm saying here is that artists can probably develop software just as well as anyone else here if they're willing to put in the time and resources.

[sethrin]

This has been personally true for me; I began my career as an artist. I've known a few others to do similarly. Most of the people who do coding schools come from other backgrounds, and you can say what you want about coding school grads, but I've met very few who I felt could not become good programmers someday. As you say, some people have a longer, harder path than others, but at the end of the day, the brain is pretty plastic.

[growlist]

Here's where we perhaps differ - I don't think most art being made today passes the test of requiring skills that take significant time to develop. A load of bricks on the floor? A woman knitting using wool pulled from her vagina and dyed with her menstrual blood? When art is purely about crazy ideas then I don't think artists have any special monopoly. If we were talking about the type of artist that has honed their skills over thousands of hours of painting, for example, I would agree that significant investment of time develops tangible skills, but this type of approach is hugely unfashionable I believe, with practitioners viewed scornfully as technicians rather than 'proper' artists.

The scorn of traditional art from conceptual art even spawned a reactionary traditionalist movement, the Stuckists.