Before the Renaissance, painters were not considered artists but craftsmen. Painting/visual arts was a craft. During the Renaissance, the painters realized that they were artists, that became a higher social status. These days, it seems that something similar is happening with artists: they discover that they are computer scientits and nerds. Seriously, especially now with the advent AI, image models, comfyui etc, thats all extremely nerdy and technical… only seeing oneself as an artist is kind of old fashioned and „traditional“.
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I wonder what the artists were doing until the painters joined them.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to get at, @betazoid
Not mutually exclusive. Human beings are complex and complicated creatures. We are all a certain degree of each of your categories.
Depending on our occupation or hobby, they are expressed differently.
The further we go back in history, I would say the more blurred the lines were. Most scientists back in the day were artists, craftspeople, physicians, engineers, chemists and theologians at the same time. Often, there was no differentiation as we have today.
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Some early comic artists were drafters by trade, doing technical drawings and such for a living.
Will Eisner, who worked on The Spirit and other comics, worked for a long time for the US Army doing PS Magazine: The Preventative Maintenance Monthly. It’s a mix of comics about Army life, but also illustrated technical manuals for things like M16 and Jeep maintenance.
You can see it too in old EC horror and sci-fi comics. Even though the subject matter is fantastical, there’s often a rigid accuracy to buildings and space craft and animals.
Exactly
I like the separation between art and artifice. As in, art as human individual or collective expression whereas artifice is just employment of your technical skills to produce something that could be conflated with art, almost always no with expression but with concrete technical goals.
BTW image generation is not nerdy or technical, it’s a tool that’s already available for the masses, you just go on X, ask grok to draw this, ask gpt to draw that, ask gemini to edit a photo, etc, the barrier to entry is zero. I would never say that a computer scientist who creates those LLMs is an artist, I mean, what art is he even creating? He is only stealing and amalgamating everything in reach into a model. He is a scientists but not an artist.
A nerd who uses ComfyUI is not an artist 