Dare call yourself an artist, what exaclty is that anyway ?

Who can honestly say what the criteria is for someone proclaiming themselves to be an artist, or indeed telling another they are one?  Surely that depends on what you perceive an artist is. Let´s explore this. 

                                  

Is an artist someone who has been to art school and art academy? Well the statistics for art students continuing after they leave art school is very low. Very few actually live the life of an artist with the vast majority doing more practical jobs once they discover how difficult it is to earn a living as an artist. I often hear people say that a person does not need to go to art school to be an artist because art is merely personal opinion. Indeed there has been past artists who never went to art school and became very successful, such as Francis Bacon. Oh no, but now we open up another question as to what is considered "success" as an artist? If art is merely opinion then OK perhaps we must all petition the Government to close all the art schools and all the art academies and remove art from the curriculum of schools. Oh and we must also tell all the past art students who attended these art schools that they have wasted their lives and thus give them the opportunity to sue the government. 

OK so then is an artist a person who creates things/draws/paints images or marks onto paper or canvas? If so then what do we do with these creations? Well for the most part we try to sell them to people. And what do these "people" do with these creations? Well for the most part they hang them on their wall in their house or apartment. OK well then we are basically saying that an artist is someone who creates objects of decoration. How nice! But if that is true then we have a problem for what if an artist creates things that no one wants to buy, does that mean they are not an artist? Well if that were true then we must agree that Van Gogh was not an artist because he only sold one painting in his entire life, and he painted thousands. 

                

And then what of the opposite scale of this scenario, if an artist sells really well and makes lots of money, does that mean that artist is a better artist than those artists that don´t sell?  Well if that were true then you are saying that the point of art is to make money. And if you believe that then I suggest that trading on the stock market is also art. 

                

Is an artist someone who makes random marks we call drawings/paintings in an abstract manner of which we hope someone might find them interesting or finds meaning in them and thus that person wishes to own it because of that?  Well if that were true then that would make everyone artists and anyway it is still about selling. 

I once heard the phrase "Is it the singer or is it the song?"  in that respect then, is it the artist or is it the art that captures are attention or has meaning? Perhaps so. Art historian Ernst Gombrich once said "There is no art only artists". Was he right, for indeed there can be no art unless we ourselves proclaim it as art and by doing that we are also saying that someone who creates an object we call art is an artist. Hmm, perhaps then it is society itself that creates artists, but if that were true then we are saying that there is a need in society for artists. Hmm interesting, what could this "need" be? Well Francis Bacon famously said that " art is a game by which mankind distracts itself". Distracts from what? What I think he meant was the distraction from the knowledge of our own impending doom, meaning that we all die. 

So is an artist someone who creates objects/images that distract us from the fear of death or perhaps boredom? Perhaps there is some truth to that.

May be if we look into the history of art at the artists whom we perceive as geniuses and why we call them that. Artists whom I admire seem to have one thing in common. They persist, they are driven. They persist in striving for something that simply cannot be explained in words or any other form of communication and they persist in this even knowing that it might be that their work/what they are trying to say, will not be understood until they are long long dead. Take the amazing discovery in 1990 by a doctor at John´s Hopkins University who noticed that Michaelangelo had painted a human brain in his God creating Adam scene. This means it took 500 years for mankind to even see it.

                     

 To be an artist is to try explore the impossible meaning of life for life itself is impossible to define. One can but try but in that trying one might die or discover that life itself it just a lie. This is why to even proclaim yourself as an artist is a brave thing to do for it is the hardest lifestyle to choose. It is also the reason why so many artists kill themselves.

I suggest that Art is not about selling but having something to say that´s worth telling; and trying to tell that message in a world full of people with blind ears and deaf eyes. A flower does not proclaim itself to be a flower, but we know it is a flower because it blossoms everyday.  But perhaps, just perhaps, that the very reason why we can´t define art or what an artist is, might be the reason why we (human-beings) are so unique. For the reason why artists create "things" is perhaps the same reason why we climb mountains. Simply because we can and we want to. However, after all that I don´t know about you but I still don´t know what an artist is.