The definition of “artist” has slowly been changing in my lifetime (not that I’m that old), and I don’t like it. It used to be that a someone who painted was a painter, and someone who sang was a singer. The label “artist” was reserved for those elite few who elevated their chosen activity to near perfection. An artist was a master of their craft. Sadly, the word is no longer used to describe brilliance, but rather anyone who attempts one of the designated activities. I could slap any old paint on a canvas and you’d have to call me an artist. The short-term effect is that people feel better about themselves (“Wow, I’m an artist!”). The long-term effect is that true mastery is lost amidst a sea of crap.
So here’s my plea: label people according to their activity. Sculpters are sculpters. Dancers are dancers. When it comes to handing out the title “artist” please be more discriminating.
Lots of folks would fit these definitions without nearing perfection. I paint but I certainly don’t consider myself an artist because I am not skilled and I don’t do it very well. I enjoy it, I’m learning, and I’m improving. There are people in my painting class who I definitely would consider artists.
I think you can be an artist without “nearing perfection.” Whose definition of “perfection” are we using? Who gets to decide? I personally think Jackson Pollock was a crackpot…others think he was a great artist.
Good luck getting people to instantly start using your definition.
Part of the problem (the way I see it) is the change in society from people that do to a society that watches. 100 years ago people would have a piano in the house and play music, now people listen to the iPod. This shift makes it so that knowing how to play makes you a musician. People use to write eloquently as a form of communication, now people just use the telephone. People use to sew now they just buy clothing and throw it away when a button falls off. When a society limits a person from multiple roles in life to trying to pigeon hole them into what they do for a living I think that this is the result.
Outstanding point! I’ve lamented that fact too (don’t get me started), but I never made the connection between that and ther term “artist” before. Thanks!
So your problem is with people who call themselves artists? Or is it with people who identify someone else as an artist and you disagree with the label for that particular person?
My problem is that while the term ‘art’ is often used as
an honorific, most art is bad art. One finds this problem in
philosophical attempts to define art–you get definitions
that preclude the fact that most artworks are failures.
Yet bad paintings are paintings, and paintings are
artworks; so there are plenty of bad artworks. I don’t
think one can gerrymander the
term so that bad art is literally impossible. There’s both good and
bad art.
I figure that, roughly, art is the product
of an effort to realize aesthetic features, like beauty…
Well, most efforts fail but the definition is
satisfied, which relates to the
intentions of the maker. As artists are people who routinely
produce artworks, most artists are bad artists.
So there is good and bad art, and there are good and
bad artists. As in most difficult endeavours, there is more
bad stuff than good, and more failed practictioners
than successful.
I’m a musician, in fact, hence an artist; but not a good one.
I have more or less given up on the “What is art?” and “Who is an artist?” question. It does seem to me that now anyone who wants to be called an artist, simply calls her/himself and artist and that’s that.
I worked in the field of bookbinding for a while. As was the tradition, I made decorated papers (using paint and a variety of tools, sort of like finger painting in a way) to cover the boards of the books. Some of them were really very lovely, but this loveliness was a matter of accident, technique, and there was not thought behind it other than achieving something pleasant to behold. People would tell me that I was an artist. I would then try to explain to them that I was not. I was in no way ashamed of my work, I was proud of it. I was making decoration, I was ornamenting things—something all peoples have felt the need to do. I felt that an artist would be going beyond what I did, an artist would have some sort of vision, would be relating what his hands did to something in the human experience, would be exploring some sorts of relationships between colors. I don’t know. I just knew that I was a craftsman (or woman, I guess) and that was just fine. It seemed as though there would need to be some sort of idea behind art.
In music, it seems that a technically excellent musician would be an artist if that musician brought life, some sort of experience beyond just playing the notes well to that music. So some of us who play an instrument are not artists, and some are. Some of us play for our own pleasure but we do not go that step further which would make the experience of hearing that music one which takes the listener to another level of experience beyond hearing and enjoying the tune.
I think part of the problem is that now it is not okay to not be an artist. People feel insulted if they are not considered to be an artist. I am not an artist in anything, yet some things I do well and am proud of that. I will never be an artist as a musician but if I could play the whistle well enough to simply please a listener, even if I don’t transport that person, I would be quite happy. I would consider myself to be a craftsman musician—one who could play a tune nicely, but not in the visionary way an artist would play it.
I have a tutorial CD by Cathal McConnell (sp), and on even the simplest tunes, all I can say is that I just felt something really different when I heard them when compared to some other CD’s I had listened to. I can’t explain what he was doing differently, but I went to another place in my mind when I heard him play. I realize that people will have different experiences with different players, and I suppose this is where the whole discussion begins again.
the rub of it is - who gets to define “Brilliance?”
All artistic standards of worth or value are subjective conventions. Yes, an artist can fail at meeting some sort of expectation defined by the convention, but the convention itself is not the same thing as “good art.”
The whole labelling game of “good art” vs. “bad art” is, to me anyway, a distortion of what people really mean, which is “This art appeals to me and that art doesn’t.”
I can;t stand Thomas Kincade paintings, but it just doesn;t make logical sense to dismiss them as categorically “bad.”
Craft seems to involve the mechanics, the know how,
of a pursuit. As in the craft of writing poems.
One can be a craftsperson but not an artist,
even in an artform. So Peter’s point is well taken
that not all musicians are artists, though many
who aren’t artists are nonetheless craftspeople.
It has to do with the vision, the emotion, one
tries to realize through the exercise of the craft.
I’m an artist at music, I believe, for me it’s
the vision and the expression and the emotion
I’m after;
my chief defect is that I lack enough craft.
So I’m not a good artist, and I suppose
might not be a good one even if I had
the craft. Anyhow I certainly would benefit
as an artist from becoming a better
musician.
When you get to bookbinding, pottery,
and crafts that produce
things valued chiefly for their utility, one tends
not to call the product art, or at least to hesitate.
Because art, I think, is a product that typically
is produced chiefly to realize aesthetic properties,
not to put the soup in or hold the book together.
We may say that there is an art to bookbinding,
but we shrink from calling the physical product ‘art.’
Still sometimes the aesthetics of the useful product
so transcend its utility that the book, the vase,
the whatever is eclipsed; it is merely the occasion
for the expression of vision, emotion, beauty.
As in Cellini’s cups, and then we call it art.
This is certainly true in literature - though some real gems get forgotten (quick - can most people name an Elizabethan dramatist other than Shakespeare?), that which retains popularity is usually among the best of its time.
In a modern context, I know many Americans who believe that, in general, English TV shows are better than the American average - but the English TV shows they see are the handful that PBS broadcasts here. Cue major disillusionment the first time they visit England and find that there’s just as high a percentage of dreck on the air as there is here. (I’ve also met English people who have the reverse conviction about American shows; I’d imagine they have the same experience when they come to the US.)
Don’t be so sure about that. There’s a ton of crap being peddled as “classic” and yes, I know of which I speak. I have a degree in English. The problem, again, is that we are watchers, not doers. We let professors study their books, then just accept what they tell us.
Jeff, I’m not saying it’s always the best of its time. Would it have been better to say that time tends to filter out the worst?
I had a second concentration in English Lit myself - I’ve seen some of what’s out there. We’ve mostly forgotten some fine writers, but we’ve also forgotten a far larger number of hacks. I agree with you on the “crap peddled as classics” charge, BTW. Though I seem to recall that the percentage of dreck being pushed seemed to go up the closer we came to modern times, the ideology of the professor, or both.
