Concept

Artist

Overview

An artist is a person who creates art or practices the arts. The most common usage in everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner of the visual arts, such as painting or drawing.

The term is also widely used in the entertainment business to refer to actors, musicians, singers, dancers, and other performers. The French word artiste is sometimes used in English in this context, although this has become old-fashioned. The use of the term "artist" to describe writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts such as critics' reviews; "author" is generally used instead.

While the use of the word 'artist' is common, there is no agreed upon definition of art—this makes the definition of who is and is not an artist indeterminate. Artists and philosophers still debate their interpretation of art's definition—on what does and does not count as art.

I am only pointing out that my project, like Collingwood's, Osborne's, and others', is metaphysical in nature. I am interested in trying to find out what a work of art is and what it is essentially.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Artist is discussed.

Any really great artist is almost sure to be thought incompetent by those among his seniors who would be generally regarded as best qualified to form an opinion. And the mere fact of having to produce work which will please older men is hostile to a free spirit and to bold innovation.
Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
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Homer would not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and perfect artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," from the actual; on the other hand, it will be appreciated that he can at times get tired to the point of despair of this eternal "unreality" and falseness of his innermost being--and that he then sometimes attempts to…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
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To produce music is also in a sense to produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the artist, and in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
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He was the first to paint objects as they really appeared; the first too, we may justly say, to confer glory by the aid of the pencil.[230] Of this artist there is a Priest in Adoration, and an Ajax struck by Lightning, a work to be seen at Pergamus at the present day: before him, there is no painting of any artist now to be seen which has the power of riveting the eye.
the Elder Pliny, The Boys' and Girls' Pliny
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Looked at in one way, such a work appears to reveal to us the very essence of the artist's personality, while regarded from another we only find there the essence of the subject-matter artistically treated, so that this very uniqueness of expression appears to arise from the unique characteristics of the material to which it is applied; and we may say with equal truth either that the expressed form is due to those…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
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Artist

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Artist

Related ideas

Place in the tradition