Noun

Singular artist

Plural artists

artist (plural artists)

1. A person who creates art.
2. A person who creates art as an occupation.
3. A person who is skilled at some activity

Derived terms

• artistic
• artistically
• artistry
• con artist
• escape artist
• piss-artist

The definition of an artist is wide-ranging and covers a broad spectrum of activities to do with creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The normal meaning in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only. The term is often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (less often for actors). "Artiste" (the French for artist) is a variant used in English only in this context. Use of the term to describe writers, for example, is certainly valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like criticism.

Art is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999). Artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind, from early pre-historic art to contemporary art.

Sourced

• "Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses."
  • Aitken, Max, recalled on his death (9 June 1964)

• "Light is impressionism."
  • Aulenti, Gae, On positioning galleries for impressionist and post impressionist paintings at the top of her design for Paris's Musée d'Orsay, Time (8 December 1986)

• "This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago."
  • Barr, Alfred, Newsweek (1 June 1964)

• "Art is made by the alone for the alone."
  • Barragán, Luis, Time (12 May 1980)

• "Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable."
  • Baskin, Leonard, Publishers Weekly (5 April 1965)

• "Any great work of art ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."
  • Bernstein, Leonard, "What Makes Opera Grand?" Vogue (December 1958)

• If the world were clear, art would not exist.
  • Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Absurd Creation" (Tr. Justin O'Brien, Vantage International, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73373-6, p. 98)

• "Art is the triumph over chaos."
  • Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978)

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wed Jul 8 05:43:59 2009