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
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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 scientist but not an artist.
A nerd who uses ComfyUI is not an artist 
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I am hearing that the ai tools and models that are integrated with Photoshop e.g. are not as powerful as comfyui. Adobe is trying to make it simple for artists but it doesnt seem to work
Photography can be: art, craft, science, technique/technical, engineering, or any combination. That is appealing; it is whatever we individually want to make it.
For example, an article in today’s Guardian (a UK newspaper) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/aug/25/cat-mussolini-wulz-photography-sisters:
Wanda and Marion Wulz defied the unbridled patriarchy of fascist Italy by shooting dancers, fencers and other famous women - as well as their cat Mucincina.
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The way I like to think of it, art is in the mind of the artists, and the eyes of the beholder. If I call it art, it is art. If you call it art, it is art. But my art may not be your art.
I would not exclude any medium from being capable of art. Photos clearly qualify, as does code, or cooking, or some random dirt on the ground. Anything can become art in the mind of a creator, or an observer.
But even though I like to think I have created the odd artwork, I don’t insider myself an artist, as I don’t pursue creative hobbies with (much) artistic intent.
Since I understand art as a quale in a human mind, computers are inherently incapable of creating art, nor appraising art. If anything, the art is created in the human observer, not the computer generating it.
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