What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? “An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor” vs. “a creator is a self-directed market expressor”. (Wondering where I fit on the 4-quadrant graph…)
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Comments 2
It's the difference between fine art and applied art.
You struck a chord with me, so please bear with it.
I think the article sets up a false dichotomy: the artist or the market. One is a human being, the other is abstractly comprised of humans, but at scale so large that it's essentially population-level. That's a big gap between 1 person and millions.
The Western conception of art is centred around the artist as genius - the one so brilliant that he has outcompeted all his peers.
Older and non-Western conceptions portray art as an interaction between the creator/artist and audience. Art arises from the interaction, and can't be created by either party in isolation. This concept is more community-oriented. Obviously I think this is the "missing third option" here.
There's a second tension implicit in saying "artist or the market" - it's really saying humanism vs commercialism. If you consider "community" as the middle ground in the spectrum of # of people involved, that comparison doesn't really hold water. Instead, communitarian art is more pro-social than the "genius artist" version.
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