I wish people these days have the attention span to actually read long form articles instead of glance at titles and then form a half baked opinion on something.

Nearly everything you said is factually incorrect.

Of course, your company won’t last two years. Honestly, how big is the market for paintings that look exactly like photographs? And even if it were sizable, you’re in an area that’s not defensible — anyone in China can set up a company to compete with you and undercut your price, because they won’t have to be paying venture capitalists, nor six-figure wages to a bunch of San Francisco tech people. You’re also competing with anyone who just runs a Photoshop filter on a printer and prints it onto paper and frames it — which costs less and has basically the same effect for most people who don’t care about art, which is your target audience.

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2) the company has already been running for almost two years, and not running off of any VC money. You would have seen this if you had read at least a quarter of the way through.

3) The company employs only one San Francisco engineer.

And your moral vacuousness is shown by the fact that, even though we all know that Chinese workers are paid very badly and your whole business model involves hiring labor at a fraction of the price that you could get in the US, there’s no point in the article you discuss “fair wages” or making sure that your offshore workers are well-treated. Perhaps you are doing it behind the scenes — but it isn’t important enough for you to mention.

3) You know that Chinese workers are paid very badly yet you still buy their products. You typed a response, which means you’ve happily consumed a Chinese made electronic device at the very least.

The artists are not badly paid, and if you read the article you’d know that we were contacted by them. We only resell their services that they are already offering, and we purchase it from them at their prices.

Mass-producing paintings that are near-perfect copies of photographs is an intrinsically crass idea and shows you simply haven’t understood the point of painting at all.

Again, this is factually incorrect. We do not mass produce any paintings. The article is about how artists mass produce paintings (as well as nearly every other product including your computing device that you bought), and how we were contacted by these artist studios to produce our custom one-off paintings.

Crass, morally bankrupt, and economically unviable — quite the triumvirate of failure

I think your toxic attack on Chinese workers was a preconceived opinion, especially since you made some factually incorrect assumptions about how we’re VC funded over-paid San Francisco engineers. You had a bone to pick and you had no thought to whose livelihoods it would hurt, or whether it was even correct. You shot first, and hoped it would be sorted out later. If anything is crass or morally bankrupt, it’s your slipshod uninformed response.

I hope you take the time to realize that attacking the livelihoods of the Chinese artists is at best culturally insensitive and at worse mildly racist. I’m Chinese myself and I was born in and lived in a rural town that produced shoes and the Apple iPod and I find your characterization of Chinese made artwork and the idea that giving them work exploitive is highly offensive. I didn’t even have a flushing toilet until I was about 4 years old and I took baths in a river. We don’t need your protection from exploitation or appreciate your pedestal of superiority. This is the type of thinking that fueled Western imperialistic conquests.