What is an Artist?

What is art? What is beauty?

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Pluto
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What is an Artist?

Post by Pluto »

An artist is someone who sits outside or on the edge of the system.
An artist is someone who works inside the system using its tools to climb up the ladder.
An artist is someone who says I'm an Artist and means it.

An artist is someone who sees that the meaning of the world including himself as ideas.
Last edited by Pluto on Sat Dec 03, 2016 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
marjoram_blues
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by marjoram_blues »

Pluto wrote:An artist is someone who sits outside or on the edge of the system.
An artist is someone who works inside the system using its tools to climb up the ladder.
An artist is someone who says I'm an Artist and means it.
What system?
Anyone who says I'm an X and means it, is not necessarily an X. But delusional.

I like the wiki article on this. It considers historical context.
And there is an excerpt from Mark Getlein:

6 activities, services or functions of contemporary artists...

( Ah well, if interested, it's typed out already... go seek...)
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Greta
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Greta »

Pluto wrote:An artist is someone who sits outside or on the edge of the system.
An artist is someone who works inside the system using its tools to climb up the ladder.
An artist is someone who says I'm an Artist and means it.
#3 is closest to correct. It's not what an artist says but what she does that makes the difference. If she produces work that she and/or others consider to be art, then it's art.

#1 and #2 refer to fringe and commercial artists respectively.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Greta wrote:
Pluto wrote:An artist is someone who sits outside or on the edge of the system.
An artist is someone who works inside the system using its tools to climb up the ladder.
An artist is someone who says I'm an Artist and means it.
#3 is closest to correct. It's not what an artist says but what she does that makes the difference. If she produces work that she and/or others consider to be art, then it's art.

#1 and #2 refer to fringe and commercial artists respectively.
Pretty much today's approach to the definition of art and artists. That may work, anyway, only in the present tense. Works and creators from the past can be viewed differently from other times, and sometimes we don't even know what they wanted to produce or what their contemporaries thought of it.
Pluto
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Pluto »

An artist is a maker, of sorts, a person who has seen the enormous creative potential in himself and of the world. The artist creates things and experiences to be ultimately seen by others. What the artist creates will be judged.
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Harbal
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Harbal »

Pluto wrote:An artist is a maker, of sorts, a person who has seen the enormous creative potential in himself and of the world. The artist creates things and experiences to be ultimately seen by others. What the artist creates will be judged.
Does intention, or lack of it, behind the creation matter? Some artists want to express or convey a specific idea, what they create is supposed to mean something. Others might create something without a meaning, just make it up as they go along. It's not meant to say anything, it is made purely for the sake of making it. It is finished when it's creator is satisfied with how it looks, or sounds, in the case of music. Although the end product of these two scenarios could well be very similar, it seems to me, that because of the reason they were made, they are very different. Is this a difference that matters as far as their validity as pieces of art is concerned? Could they both qualify as art but belong to different classes of art?
Pluto
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Pluto »

I think they can both be art or not, and agree that sometimes an artist doesn't know what or why they are doing something, and this is okay, and can actually be a good thing. Being a painter, I've noticed on a number of occasions, that something like intuition, precedes thinking. That thought has to play catch up to what has just happened on the canvas.
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Harbal
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Harbal »

Pluto wrote:I think they can both be art or not, and agree that sometimes an artist doesn't know what or why they are doing something, and this is okay, and can actually be a good thing. Being a painter, I've noticed on a number of occasions, that something like intuition, precedes thinking. That thought has to play catch up to what has just happened on the canvas.
But surely, they are different things, regardless of the fact that they may appear similar. Is this difference of no significance?
Pluto
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Pluto »

knowing what you're doing compared with not knowing when making an artwork are just two sides of the same coin. As you are making something, even if you don't know where it's going you are moving it to a place where you think or feel it should go. I would say the knowing and not knowing are tied-up together in the process. What differences, along with their outcomes, do you see?
Pluto
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Pluto »

A human person who makes something
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Harbal
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Harbal »

Pluto wrote: What differences, along with their outcomes, do you see?
When I like art, it is only ever on an aesthetic level. I don't see any value in it as a medium for expressing anything so, to me, there is no difference between the two scenarios that I described. For someone who does value art as a means of expression, however, I would have thought there would be a big difference.
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Dontaskme
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Dontaskme »

The only Real Artist is Mother Nature. Everything else is Artificial.

The Artist is never in the picture. The Picture is in the Artist.
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Terrapin Station
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Terrapin Station »

In my opinion artists are simply people who make music, films, paintings, sculptures, novels, choreography, etc.

In other words, I add absolutely no "extraordinary" or "gifted" or "mystical" etc. connotation to the word "artist."

Artists are simply people who make certain kinds of things, who perform certain types of activities, just like mechanics, accountants, farmers, etc.
Dubious
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Dubious »

Terrapin Station wrote:In my opinion artists are simply people who make music, films, paintings, sculptures, novels, choreography, etc.

In other words, I add absolutely no "extraordinary" or "gifted" or "mystical" etc. connotation to the word "artist."

Artists are simply people who make certain kinds of things, who perform certain types of activities, just like mechanics, accountants, farmers, etc.
Nice to know that Mozart, Milton and Michelangelo are no better than mechanics and accountants.
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Greta
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Re: What is an Artist?

Post by Greta »

Dubious wrote:Nice to know that Mozart, Milton and Michelangelo are no better than mechanics and accountants.
Perhaps no better than once-in-a-century genius mechanics and accountants.
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