Artist

If you take photographs, you might be a picture-taker or you might be an artist. If you are an artist, your art “speaks” to you. It may mean nothing to anyone else. If your art becomes well known, many people to whom it meant nothing may decide to place a copy of your art in their homes simply because it is valued by people whom they do not know and will never meet. Popularity doesn’t make you a better artist.

If something mundane or commercial has a special appeal to someone or to a small number of people, and it wasn’t created by someone who calls herself an artist, is it art anyway? Who decides what is and what isn’t art?

A painting is a solitary work of creativity. The painter requires only a blank surface and pigments. (Brushes are a nice option, however.) A photograph is a collaboration; it involves the photographer and the engineers who designed the optics and other camera mechanisms, and (on modern cameras) the computer chip in the camera that augments the picture to get the “best” photograph of which the camera is capable. (Note my quotes around “best”.) Is it art if hundreds of strangers work behind the scenes to help create it? And if it is, who is the artist?

I’m a part time picture-taker and (maybe) a part time artist. With every press of the shutter release, my small camera does it’s best to take a “perfect” picture. Then I look at all the photos and pick one that has special appeal and I try to make the photo even better. To me, that may mean forsaking realism for things like beauty and meaning. Many a photograph has been enhanced in the darkroom or airbrushed later. Today's photos are digital and the darkroom is software. It is still the artist who transforms the photograph in pursuit of a vision.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the greatest and most beloved artists of all time. He produced more than 2,100 artworks, including 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. Yet he sold only two paintings during his lifetime (a popular legend says he sold only one painting). He committed suicide at age 37, thinking himself a failure.

Are you an artist if you’re the only person who thinks so? Are you not an artist if you’re the only person who thinks so? Who gets to decide? And does it really matter?