ARTISTS AND ARTISANS

• ARTIST – Generally defined as an art practitioner, such as a painter, choreographer, dancer, writer, poet,
musician, and the like, who produces or creates indirectly functional arts with aesthetic values using
imagination.
• ARTISANS– Craftsman, such as carpenters, carvers, plumbers, blacksmiths, weavers, embroiders, and
the like, who produce directly functional and/or decorative arts.
• In the advent of technology, it is remarkable what has now been made possible with a click of a button,
an array of overwhelming information is made available, informing every aspect of human life. The fast-
paced and highly complex twenty-first century, there is a real nagging fear that soon, everything may
very well be replaced by computers and robots that can arguably do things with more precision, at a
shorter amount of time and less capital in the long term.
• The Arts is one of the most significant ways in which we try to grapple with how the present unfolds.
• In Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit (1923), he stated that “Art when really understood is the province of
every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything well. It is not an outside, extra
thing.
• In Peter Drucker’s seminal book Post-Capitalist Society (1993), he stated that “the real controlling
resource and the absolutely decisive factor of production is neither capital not land nor labor. It is
knowledge. Instead of capitalists and proletarians, the classes of the post society are the knowledge
workers and the service workers”. Arguably, one type of knowledge that fuels the twenty-first century is
creativity. This evident in the recognition that professionals in the creative sector are integral drivers and
movers in society and an integral segment of this sector artists.
• Artist have treaded a long history. Their roots can likewise be traced in one of the major milestones in
human civilization.
• In the first episode of the video series “New Ways of Seeing,” a project by the New York Times” T Brand
Studio and jewelry giant Tiffany & Co., art critic Jerry Saltz (2016) underscored the significance of not
only the discovery of the cave paintings, but also paintings themselves.