The artist and the artistic process

Not what makes something art, but who counts as an artist and who decides: an inborn gift, a status others grant, or a widespread human drive?

An artist is a rare person born with an inborn creative gift — feeling more deeply and pouring out an inner vision, not made by training.

You're an artist when the art world treats you as one — critics review you, galleries show you, museums keep you. A status granted, not a spark.

Strength: explains why the same object is art in a gallery, junk in a skip. Weakness: makes 'artist' a matter of fashion and gatekeeping.

Powerful art by untrained people outside the art world, made because they must — it challenges both the genius and artworld views.

Many cultures had no special 'artist' role — people wove, carved and sang as part of ordinary life — hinting 'the artist' is a recent Western idea.

If 'the artist' is a spotlight some cultures shine on a few, then making may be an ordinary human drive we all share.

Born genius · art world status · outsider art (neither) · a Western invention (maybe we're all makers).

The whole activity of making a work, from first idea to finished piece — imagining, trying, choosing and realising.

Imagination = the leap to something new; craft = the trained skill to realise it. Neither alone is enough.

Even spontaneous work rests on years of practice that make the spontaneity possible.

The three choices every maker faces: what the work is for, what shape/medium it takes, and what it is about.

Some traditions prize originality (say something new); others prize mastery and continuity (get the inherited form exactly right).

The picture of one solitary artist creating alone — challenged by films, cathedrals, songs and workshops made by many hands.

Even those rest on borrowed techniques, teachers and traditions — no one creates from nothing.

The 'lone genius' process is the twin of the 'born genius' artist — both spotlight one person and hide the web of others.

Each new tool reopens what art even is, not just how it's made — the camera, film, digital and now AI all move the boundary of art.

Photography 'wasn't art', yet became one and freed painting to explore expression — a new tool moves the boundary of art rather than erasing it.

The photographer chooses what, when, how and why to frame — the choosing is where the art lives.

Images or music produced by a machine trained on huge amounts of existing work, from a short human prompt.

If a machine did the making, is there any art here — or just a clever output?

Who made it — the person who typed the words, the coders, or the countless artists whose work trained the machine?

The same 'is a machine-made image art?' worry, but sharper — the human has stepped further back from the work.

To what the machine can't do — the choosing, the meaning and the why (the irreducibly human part).

How free the artist should be and to whom they answer: reflecting a society's values (mirror) or reshaping them (agent of change).

Reflecting a society's existing values back to it — portraits, folk songs, shared stories; the artist expresses society rather than leading it.

Challenging a society and pushing it to change — naming injustice, imagining what isn't yet, unsettling the comfortable.

Yes — often holding a mirror up to a society honestly is exactly what forces it to change.

The special freedom art is granted to provoke, offend and imagine the forbidden — more than we'd allow in ordinary speech.

The freedom that lets art change society is the same freedom the powerful want to control — a line must protect people without silencing dissent.

To themselves and their own vision, to a cause they serve, or to moral, political and social ends — the topic's open question.

What is an artist? → how art gets made → how technology reshapes it → what the artist and society owe each other.