An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the term is also often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (although less often for actors). "Artiste" (French for artist) is a variant used in English in this context, but this use has become rare. The use of the term "artist" to describe writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts such as critics' reviews. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the older broad meanings of the term "artist": A learned person or Master of Arts. One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, astrology, alchemy, chemistry. A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice. A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic. One who makes their craft a fine art. One who cultivates one of the fine arts – traditionally the arts presided over by the muses. The Greek word "techně", often translated as "art", implies mastery of any sort of craft. The adjectival Latin form of the word, "technicus", became the source of the English words technique, technology, and technical. In Greek culture, each of the nine Muses oversaw a different field of human creation: Calliope (the 'beautiful of speech'): chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry Clio (the 'glorious one'): muse of history Erato (the 'amorous one'): muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics, and marriage songs Euterpe (the 'well-pleasing'): muse of music and lyric poetry Melpomene (the 'chanting one'): muse of tragedy Polyhymnia or Polymnia (the '[singer] of many hymns'): muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing, and rhetoric Terpsichore (the '[one who] delights in dance'): muse of choral song and dance Thalia (the 'blossoming one'): muse of comedy and bucolic poetry Urania (the 'celestial one'): muse of astronomy No muse was identified with the visual arts of painting and sculpture.

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Ontological neighbourhood
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Quand les artistes font forme en habitant ensemble. Usages, présences, imaginaires.

Mathilde Coline Chénin

Taking root within a historical and transversal perspective of communities of artists at work, and of the relationship that they nourish with the places that host their creative activity, the present research intends to bring to light the grammars of "the ...
EPFL2022

New Approaches to Artistic Synthesis Relying on Visual Perception

Mahmut Sami Arpa

Artists often take advantage of the limitations of the human visual system to create art that provides new experiences for the observers. Similarly, in this thesis, we explore new computational artistic compositions that create new visual experiences by re ...
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"Een Italische Keucken van Dirick de Vriese" The Commercialisation of the Artistic Identity between Venice and the 'North'

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In the second half of the sixteenth century the artistic exchanges between Venice and the Low Countries intensified. Although no Venetian painters settled in Antwerp or in the cities of the Low Countries, several painters of Flemish origin, in particular D ...
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Related concepts (16)
Fine art
In European academic traditions, fine art is made primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. In the aesthetic theories developed in the Italian Renaissance, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination, unrestricted by any of the practical considerations involved in, say, making and decorating a teapot.
The arts
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations.
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines, such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art.
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