1:47 PM 10/25/2004 - Chicago
'Artist' is not a profession.
A person can attend university for 4, 6, or 8 years, and when they graduate, they might be a physicist, a psychiatrist, or an engineer, but no university can confer an 'artist' degree, upon a graduate, because no such degree exists. The best they can do, is to confirm that the person studied in some art-related field or other.
A person can become a musician, painter, dancer, comedian ,sculptor, actor, or other art-related professional, but there is no such thing as a 'professional artist'.
Try finding a universally accepted definition of 'art', and you will begin to see what I am driving at.
If an artist is a person who creates 'works of art'... but there is no adequate definition of what defines a work of art, then however the word 'artist' is defined, it's definition must suffer from the same ambiguity as it's root word... art.
One attribute of 'art', that might be generally accepted, is that 'it' is above the norm, and exceptional, in some way or other. If this general idea is expanded upward to 'artist', then an artist is a person who engages in a kind of work that produces something of 'above the norm', and 'exceptional' quality.
This, however... producing exceptional work... is not a 'profession'... it is something else entirely, either a reflection of the person's character, or a product of their years of hard work and study, or they were just born with a 'blessed knack' to do something extremely well, or perhaps a lucky accident.
So if somebody tells me they are an artist, I can only wonder what they mean.
I'm not an artist, I'm a journeyman painter.
The best I will ever dare to say of myself, is that I am an aspiring artist, leaving the determination of how successful my efforts are, to the rest of humanity. If I ever do think that I have achieved the admirable goal of 'becoming an artist', I will have the good sense (and good grace) to keep it to myself.
To my eye, when a person is referred to as an 'artist' by third parties, a high compliment is being paid them, but when an individual is self-described as an 'artist', they are treading on thin, pretentious ice.
A couple years ago, the notion of 'Journeyman Painter' occurred to me. Hundreds of years ago, painting was a profession... or a trade. Some really interesting work was created by those painters of yore. I don't know for sure, but I don't think those painters thought about themselves in the sense that 'artist' implies, here in the early 21st century. They seem to have been very much involved in the craft of what they were doing, and still managed to turn out works that are to this day, considered 'art', by the 'professional deciders', and the rest of us unwashed masses, alike.
I decided that I would work with all my might on becoming the best painter that I could, and if 'art' was the eventual result of my efforts, all well and good.
Painting can be roughly divided into two facets... 'art', and 'craft'. Nobody has much trouble defining the 'craft' half of this dichotomy, and there is an amazing amount of disagreement, about the 'art' half of the formula.
Most of what has been said, discussed, argued about, and disagreed/fought about, over the past century, where 'art' is concerned, has come and gone... each new idea, theory, notion, etc., being 'all the rage' for a short time, then being displaced by the 'next big thing', and then dying. Art has more 'religious-flavoured' wars, than religion does. In the mean time... painting has been plodding along. At various points, it was decreed that 'painting was dead', that 'portraiture was dead', that 'art was dead', etc., etc., but painting has just continued plodding along, oblivious of its death... or possibly, the 'rumours of its death, have been greatly exagerated'. Apparently, the human psyche has decided, independent of the art pundits, that it (the human psyche) has further need of what painters produce.
Classical forms of painting... those made prior to the 'Moderns Explosion' of the 20th century, paid more attention to craft, than painting in the 'Modern' styles, where the 'idea', or 'emotion', or 'artistic impule' is king.
Techinque was even criticised as being 'elitist'... mostly by those who were either too lazy or incompetent to master the craft-skills... and considered a detriment to 'artistic inspiration'.
But one by one, the 'isms', and 'ists', and 'schools', and notions of Modern Theory rose up, flourished briefly, and died, while the painters who were not vying for positions on 'the cutting edge', just kept plodding along, borrowing what they found useful from one 'school' and another, and incorporating it into their repertoire of 'things that can be done as part of a painting', and producing work, out of the central limelight of the gallery scene.
I believe that now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the Moderns Movement has essentially burned itself out, and the large body of mostly-anonymous, 'non-star' painters who have been pursuing their work in the background for most of the 20th century, are moving to the fore.
In the battle between 'Craft' and 'Art', there can be no winner.
The skills of craft, without the content of art, produce a beautiful non-sense... 'He has absolutely nothing to say, but he says it beautifully'.
On the other hand, having a head jam-packed with profound content is useless, if one does not possess the tools to present the content to the world in a comprehensible format. If I scribble the most brilliant utterance imaginable in a careless, unreadable script, no-one will 'get it'... and it will not be their fault that they didn't 'get it', it will be my fault.
The same situation exists, if I try to write a novel, but limit myself to a vocabulary of 10 words... no matter how brilliantly I use the 10 words... think what I might have been able to say, if I had used 20 words... or 100 words!
Painters who abandon the craft of painting, to focus solely on the idea, limit their abilities to communicate, in pretty much the same way.
A while back, Edward Wilson wrote a book titled 'Consilience', in which he suggested that 'the age of increasing specialisation' is ending, and the 'age of consilience' is beginning... that specialised fields of knowledge... like physics and chemistry (and like physics and art, to choose a more widely divergent pair), can no longer adequately advance, independent of one another.
While this is fairly obvious in the case of physics and chemistry, it still holds true (but is less obvious) in other cases.
I'm a painter in the fine arts, but I am also a writer, and I build computers, know a few programming languages, and use the Internet to sell my work (which permits me to eat, and continue my work), and also to disseminate my ideas (memes... the cultural equivalent to genetic information contained in DNA), etc. around the world, using both images and words... the images able even to bridge language barriers.
So my work at easel benefits from my understanding of computer science, 'Internet psychology', how best to use Photoshop to clean up images of my paintings, and make them load quickly in other people's browsers, how to sell effectively on eBay, how to fix my physical computer when it breaks down, etc.
I am a painter in the fine visual arts... but under that cover, I am a maker and distributor of cultural information... memes... and am using 21st century methods to both do my work, and enter it into the 21st century global cultural ledger.
So my work has a high degree of consilience... I do not work in isolation from other disciplines.
I think this is a good idea... that 21st century painters look long and hard, outside the confines of their art, their craft, and especially, the prison that 'ArtWorld', aka 'The Gallery Scene', has become.