Where is the line in the sand drawn? Is it still the work of the artist when someone else is the artisan who makes it a concrete reality? This question has existed for a long time: many of the great masters of historical art became established, then hired a team of assistants and apprentices to allow them to produce more work. The scene of a group of artisans toiling away under the watchful eye of the master artist is not a new one. Still, there is uncertainty in what makes the artist an artist, and not just another “idea man.”
At MDM Props in London, a man named Nigel Schofield and his team of artisans and technicians are in the business of outsourced art. They fabricate (read: engineer, construct, and finish) art for clients who are themselves established artists in need of additional personnel for whatever reason. MDM Props maintains that they are not artists – the artist is the client with the idea and the vision. You can read more about them in this Wired News article.
On the one hand, I can see the appeal. If I had an idea for a fifty-foot bronze sculpture, it would never see life – because I don’t have the facilities or staff to construct something that big, much less in bronze. Being able to sign up a fabrication shop to make it for me makes sense, and if I do a share of the work and supervise the whole thing I could still consider that I’m responsible for it without feeling too pretentious.
On the other hand, something about the whole distinction of art and artist and artisan makes me leery. For instance, if I were working in a marketing agency as a graphic designer, by the same line of reasoning that MDM uses, I’m not an artist: I’m a technician. The Art Director is the only real artist on staff, because regardless of their creative contributions (which are apparently broad in the case of some of MDM’s projects) the art staffers are just doing the will of the Man With The Plan, who is the actual artist. That’s…well…galling.
In a nutshell, the “artist” behind a project simply becomes the highest-ranking member of the production team who is interested in the title. If the boss can’t even draw stick figures but he comes up with all the ideas and explains them to the production staff, he’d be the “artist” at MDM, but he’d just be a manager at another business. In most ad agencies, the Art Director is usually the highest-ranked artist on staff – so even if an idea originates with someone else, the AD is considered to be responsible for the project: it’s his (or her) baby.
Things are simpler when you’re talking about art as the work of a single artist, working alone, or perhaps with a few assistants as extra hands on a large project. When it becomes possible to be an artist without having to lift a paintbrush (or blowtorch, or chisel, or whatever) I wonder if we aren’t devaluing the word “artist” by diluting it to mean “anyone with an idea and funding.”
This same devaluation is why I have a low tolerance for some modern art. The idea that being an artist doesn’t require any measurable degree of skill or craftsmanship seems to devalue it – if anybody who can hold a paintbrush and spatter Home Depot Exterior Gloss Latex (Red) on a canvas is an artist, then everybody is an artist, if they want to be.
Okay, fine. So maybe everybody is a potential artist. I can deal with that, by itself. But when you distance art from absolutes, it muddies things further.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Art is subjective. If only the viewer can decide if art is “good” or “bad” in some way, does that render skill or craftsmanship a meaningless achievement? Why bother learning to draw at all? It’s not an artistic pursuit anymore, it’s a technical one. I could have spent all those years of practice at drawing doing something more productive…like spreading oatmeal and monkey shit on canvas with a spatula and selling it to galleries. If I throw in a can of paint and a big brush, along with a plaque explaining the meaning of the work and instructing viewers to paint the canvas with the provided brush and can of acrylic, it becomes avant-garde installation art and a “moving, immersive experience” for viewers young and old.
Maybe the key is to let go of my desire for higher significance or any absolute values in art. I should just recognize that art, as a field, is a kind of masturbatory, incestuous exercise of human culture where we try to see significance in the things we make and do and feel, and we observe ourselves and make snide comments while we’re doing it…even if, to the cosmos at large, all our deep observations boil down to smears of pigment and oil on plant fiber.
Or, to put it another way: one can only make art for oneself. You can please yourself, you can please some of the people some of the time, and that’s it. Everything else is a pretense or a cry for attention or both.
Maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to the field of commercial art: a paycheck is a very concrete reinforcement of the value of my work to others.
I am cynical before my time.
-Wes