There's a pretty cool example of this in LA: http://breweryartwalk.com/about

It's a big complex-style area of apartments + buildings, super walkable, and twice a year they open it up for a "Brewery Art Walk". Pretty incredible work there.

Makes me feel a bit weird wondering how successful / wealthy the artists need to be to afford living there though - Yiwu is a bit more affordable.

Artists love producing works dictated to them by consumers for twelve hours a day in Yiwu sweatshops. They love it so much.

I wasn't attempting to glorify the factory model, simply pointing out the space. Removing the function of mass producing art objects and looking at it as a collective studio space it's pretty awesome.

Fair -- I kind of glided over that caveat in your post; my apologies.

Go and read the article, it's not quite like that.

Edit to say: Although, this article is sort of an ad for Instapainting, so of course they're going to make things sound positive.

> Go and read the article, it's not quite like that.

I am sure the factories of Communist China are completely open and transparent when western reporters go poking around, and do their utmost to ensure they have the most accurate information available.

I'm sure they don't (and yes, your sarcasm is obvious), but the point is that while they're open about the fact that there are "factories" there, there's also a lot of smaller studios with different conditions. Unless the Chinese government sets up tons of small fake studios that seems to be the case. I have first hand experience that people certainly do set up small independent private businesses in China, so I see little reason to doubt that.

So it would seem it's not quite like that. It's somewhat like that in that you can find the factories if you want - and there's pictures in the article - but at the same time that doesn't mean there's not also room for something less like manufacturing and more like art.

At the same time, I don't get the negativity. Lots of people do worse jobs. It seems some people are upset that something they see as a creative-only endeavour is being treated as manufacturing, but there's been painters studios with "manufacturing" for hundreds of years. The only thing that is new is the scale.

And while for some painters that will be all the commercial work they do, for others it's a way of getting experience and perfecting technique, the same way it has historically been. Or just a way to pay the bills to let them paint for enjoyment in their spare time - the proportion of artists of most kinds that can live of their art is miniscule most places.

That's a fair comment and that sort of thing is why I added my edit.