What Does It Mean to Be an Artist?

Abstract

Who is an artist? Questions over how to define this role divided the makers of the project The Invisible Visual: Visual Art in Poland—Its State, Role, and Significance. The authors’ sources of data were the results of a nationwide survey, a survey of graduates of the Polish Academy of Fine Arts in the years 1975–2011, and in-depth interviews with seventy individuals in the field of visual arts. The authors were able to establish, first, that persons working in the art field give different definitions from those beyond its bounds; second, that artists, decision-makers, curators, and critics try to defend the sense and autonomy of their activities against ways of thinking and acting that are typical of other areas of the social world (while they are themselves engaged in disputes over who has a right to call him- or herself an artist and what is and isn’t good art); and third, being an artist is marked by a difficult-to-cross boundary, as is shown by the common necessity of supplementing artistic work by other sources of income and the high risk of failure in an artistic career.