On defining the 'artist' that I'm writing this for

Before I begin this series properly, I’d like to make some clear definitions of who I’m writing the majority of these notes for, and who I believe will benefit the most from them. As I’m going to be talking about artists and artworking a lot throughout this series, it’s really important to be super clear about how I’m using those terms, and who I’m addressing when I use them. This may change occasionally - in those cases I’ll do my best to point out the moments when this might shift. For the most part however, I’ll be focusing on the fields of practise I feel most experienced to weigh in on.

There’s a very wide spectrum of countless creative people who would call themselves artists. Some of the considerations that one artist occupying a specific place on that spectrum will encounter in their practise will overlap with another artist at a very different place on that spectrum. Others will effectively be two sets of a venn diagram that never overlap. I cannot claim to speak for all artists, and don’t intend to even try. To that end, the person I will be writing the majority of these notes for, who I believe will get the most out of the insights I share and the concerns I will speak to, are those practitioners I consider to be vocational artists.

Differentiating between two kinds of ‘Artist’

For the purpose of this site, to help me narrow down who I wanted to write for, I tried to simplify what an artist could be, and to keep distinctions between any of these as lean as possible. Focusing primarily on differences in function, I found it helpful to effectively divide all artists into either two categories - Contemporary Artist and Vocational Artist. Within both of those distinctions, I found it also helped me to clearly define tiers of practise or experience: Model, Established, Student, Aspiring, Enthusiast. This is of course, a massive oversimplification - there are countless kinds of humans living and working as artists, doing all kinds of work in all manner of different ways, many of which would not fall neatly into such narrow classifications. But I was trying to find some universal points of practise and stages of journeys that would roughly classify, and hopefully differentiate between, how each of these artists might function, how they might practise their work, how they might earn a living, how they might learn about their craft and develop their skills, and how they might engage with the work of others in their field.

The Contemporary Artist

So that covers why I wanted to differentiate between Contemporary Artist and Vocational Artist, but how was I defining those terms, and why did I think there was significant enough difference between the two types to separate them from each other? Contemporary is a fairly broad, nebulous term, and vocational most commonly infers professional. Yet there are countless professional contemporary artists. So for the purpose of this exercise, I defined Contemporary Artist as:

• Someone whose primary purpose in their work is to both reflect and comment on modern-day society
• Someone whose work is the realisation of their own singular, particular, unique vision - with the caveat that this vision is often developed through exposure to other established works and readings of critical ideas from both the past and the present
• Someone whose primary venue for their work is within a conventional art gallery - or art gallery adjacent (festival, conference, symposium, residency) - setting
• Someone for whom the medium of their work provides a foundation for engaging with a deeper cultural dialogue concerning larger contextual frameworks
• Someone focused on producing work that is often primarily challenging and interesting, as opposed to simply producing work that looks good, is aesthetically pleasing, or equates the value of art to matters of skill or craft
• Someone who questions traditional ideas of how art is defined, what constitutes art - and an artist - as well as how art is made
• Someone who contextualises their work within - or sometimes in opposition to - established historical styles and movements
• Someone who doesn’t necessarily produce work as their sole, or primary, means of income. They may not earn much money for their work, if they earn any at all, and where money is involved, they may rely heavily - or entirely - on funding from arts grants to produce their work. That is, the more traditional form of work-for-payment that we associate with commerce is rarely a primary factor in whether the work is made or not.

This last one is a bit murky, as we’ll see when we get to the tiers of practise, but it’s a common enough differentiator between Contemporary and Vocational that it needs to be included.

In my own life, I would often refer to this kind of practitioner as a Visual Artist, primarily because I graduated with a degree in Visual Arts, and the kind of artist I’m thinking of here works in the exact same manner I was exposed to, and encouraged to develop in my own practise, for the same purpose, often within the same setting I’m thinking of here. The goal of a Visual Artist through this lens of mine was to exhibit work, which meant learning about the history of our medium, using our understanding of the medium to engage with, and challenge, established ideas of art, and placing our work within that broader contextual framework. Most of my peers were not looking to become commercial artists. We had ideas we wanted to explore through our understanding of, and use of, our mediums. But I’m not sure the term Visual Artist is universal enough, so I’ve chosen to settle on Contemporary Artist.

The Vocational Artist

So we can see from this list that I chose to focus heavily on points of difference like skill vs concept, agency of vision and intended venue and audience. There are surely countless ways to define what constitutes vocational in the context of art production, but again, for the purpose of this series, I defined Vocational Artist as:

• Someone whose primary purpose in their work is to complete externally defined goals and objectives to the best of their abilities
• Someone whose work is often the realisation of someone else’s vision, often with multiple channels of input
• Someone who contributes specialist, discrete work to a single, or smaller, element of a project as part of a larger production pipeline
• Someone whose primary venue for their work is within more established, conventional media settings - print, digital, online/OOH, film and streaming/broadcast, etc
• Someone for whom the medium of their work provides a foundation for skill development, and often defines the scope of their professional role and title
• Someone focused primarily on producing work that both looks good and is aesthetically pleasing
• Someone for whom the accurate definition of their role, what constitutes the particular form of practise they specialise in, and how it is made, is very important within larger production pipelines
• Someone who often needs to re-contextualise their output within an always-shifting field of established pictorial styles and trends
• Someone whose sole, or primary, source of income - no matter how small or large - is derived from their work as an artist. Their vocation is their livelihood.

Just like before, this last one can be a little fuzzy depending on which tier of practise they are currently in, but for the vocational artist, let’s assume that is the primary financial end goal .

I really like the term artworker for this, and I tend to use it a lot in personal and professional settings. It’s not a widely accepted or commonly used term, but I feel like it does a lot of heavy lifting right from the outset to convey its meaning. It immediately separates itself from artist, which I almost always think of in terms of someone with complete creative agency and autonomy, an individual with a specific vision, and the means and resources to realise that vision. The term artworker, to me at least, conveys a more functional role, as someone skilled in an artistic field who works for others, who helps to realise someone else’s vision. They could be independent, individual practitioners, overseeing and executing every stage of artwork production themselves, or they could work within a broader team, focusing on discrete stages of work as part of a larger pipeline. However, as with visual artist, I feel like artworker isn’t really universal enough, so I’ll stick with Vocational Artist.

Defining Various Tiers of Experience

Within these two categories, I also felt it important to classify different tiers of experience - Model, Established, Student, Aspiring, Enthusiast - that help to loosely define the kinds of considerations each practitioner may encounter in their work. I’ve classified these as follows:

• Model: This is effectively the highest profile practitioner within a specific field. Model practitioners are well known, will have an established audience and well defined characteristics or unique styles, or established modes of practise, that are commonly used to define their work, and are often the primary reason they are sought out to produce more work. Because of this, they are more likely to have complete agency over the end result of the work they produce, both in terms of overall vision and executed formal qualities of the work. Model practitioners are often highly sought after when it comes to work opportunities - usually meaning work offers come to them, as opposed to needing to seek them out. They often have representation that takes care of business affairs for them.

• Established: Experienced, working practitioners. It’s difficult to settle on clear, universal definitions for established practitioners between both Contemporary and Vocational Artists, due to the nature of their work. I’d suggest that Established Contemporary Artists would be artists who regularly exhibit their work, and may even be well known and invited to participate in conferences and festivals, but are generally not making much money from their work. Their practise may be largely funded by arts grants, and due to the often fickle economics of practising in the arts, their art practise is not their primary source of income. To this end, they may often be undertaking post-graduate studies or even working in academia as a researcher or facilitator. Established Vocational Artists may be independent, working freelance, or they may have established, traditional careers working with teams and organisations in permanent capacities. Independently, they may oversee and execute every stage of smaller productions themselves, or they could work within a broader team, focusing on discrete stages of work as part of a larger pipeline. Often they may even be considered more generalists, being able to work across a range of areas adjacent to their primary field of practise. There is often a clear trail of progression in their practise, starting out working on smaller projects, often guided and mentored by senior staff, and many may shift from hands-on practitioners to managing lead or supervisory roles as their careers evolve. Across both Contemporary and Vocational, established practitioners aren’t necessarily looking to become model practitioners, although some established practitioners may transition into that at some stage.

• Student: Someone studying within established academic institutions - often facilitated by, and under the guidance of, established practitioners - with the sole purpose of learning how to become an established practitioner themselves. Often entertains aspirations of becoming a model practitioner.

• Aspiring: Someone not studying, but with genuine interest, aptitude and talent for their field of practise, able to devote time, energy and financial resources into becoming more capable and skilled in their field. Aspires to become a student, established or model practitioner.

• Enthusiast: Someone independently interested in their field of practise, with no aspirations towards becoming any of the above. Often working full time in a completely unrelated field, who is quite content to see themselves as an occasional hobbyist first and foremost. Someone who simply enjoys their practise whenever they can, is often part of an equally enthusiastic community, and often engages with work made by other practitioners in their field as much as they engage with their own practise.

A Necessary Caveat

A significant factor in making these granular distinctions between both types of artist, and stages of experience, was due to how fuzzy conversations relating to the use of generative technologies within the arts were, or for the purpose of making art. When I started writing this note, I initially got very sidetracked trying to map out all the discrete threads of conversation that effectively got shut down by variations of “this doesn’t align to my interpretation of art/artist”, and realised that whole issue was better left for a separate entry - or possibly even multiple entries - altogether. The easiest way to avoid that mess was to simply say “yes, we all have different interpretations of what art is, what it means to be an artist, and the kinds of considerations that are most important to those we consider to be artists”, followed by “for the purpose of what I can contribute to this conversation, this is what I explicitly mean when I talk about both art and artist.” What I have listed above shouldn’t be seen as a definitive, universal truth that I expect everyone to immediately fall in line with. It’s simply the easiest way for me to define who this will be most valuable for, and who I’m thinking of when I use the terms art and artist.

Putting This All Together

So that’s a fairly thorough rundown on making the distinction between two kinds of artist, the type of art they are most likely to produce, and five modes of operation they might engage in as a practitioner of art. As I said at the beginning, I’ll be speaking much more heavily towards Vocational Artists throughout this series. But this isn’t simply a distinction between commercial and non-commercial work. To me, one of the most important distinctions that will separate those who will gain the most from the insights I’d like to share, and those who may only occasionally find something of interest hidden within, comes down to this distinction:

Contemporary Artist

• Someone focused on producing work that is often primarily challenging and interesting, as opposed to simply producing work that looks good, is aesthetically pleasing, or equates the value of art to matters of skill or craft.

Vocational Artist

• Someone focused primarily on producing work that both looks good and is aesthetically pleasing, and who’s medium provides a foundation for skill development.

Contemporary artists are incredibly skilled, but the skill aspect often takes very different forms compared to an artist working vocationally.

Despite graduating from a Visual Arts program, and nurturing a life long love for what I would consider visual arts photography, I have spent my entire adult life as an artworker-for-hire, and an independent educator, often hired for my experience in the enterprise and commercial world. Although I’ve taught at, and designed programs for, many Universities throughout my working life, I have never been what I would consider to be a part of academia, I never did post-grad studies, and I have never really engaged with the Contemporary Art world with any kind of enthusiasm. To this end, I simply do not know enough about the day-to-day considerations of artists working within that area, and cannot pretend to speak for them in any meaningful way.

The key difference here relates to the importance of skill development for vocational artists, and how in the process of framing their capabilities through the motives of commercial work, and all its considerations - balancing turnaround speed, revision flexibility and finish quality, translating external requirements by interpreting perceptual clues and transforming them into successful aesthetic outcomes - they gain access to (often unknowingly, if my years of enterprise training has taught me anything) a form of long term skill development that tends to stay with, and complement its practitioners for life. These benefits may be present in other forms of practise. I imagine they are. But I don’t know anything about those other forms of practise, and cannot speak to them. This is what I know, and this is what I can speak to.

This is a form of genuine, meaningful, lifelong learning that I feel is becoming increasingly pushed aside for short term gain; particularly as the world of tech - or at least a specific, very influential faction of this world - with its fascination with efficiency and increasing productivity, its commerce-first value systems and its technically coded interpretations of aesthetic and artistic concerns, continues to expand its reach into more and more facets of our social and cultural spaces. As more practitioners and organisations become increasingly concerned with how to game social platforms for attention and engagement, as more independent artists gradually transition into part- or even full-time content creators, and as more and more aspiring and student practitioners grow up with less connection to any kind of meaningful understanding of a time before all of this, that trend will likely just continue. The skills one needs to seemingly thrive in these matters are, I believe, short term abilities that can appear to benefit practitioners, but effectively just grant them status to become marketers, beta testers and ultimately renters, helping to pay their landlords mortgage.

This is not to say that one cannot gain meaningful skills from short term abilities, but rather that the value of linking a short term ability to a long term skill becomes significantly less meaningful in a world increasingly guided by short term gains. This is the premise of all forms of technological progress; when powers in a given domain are selectively amplified, the rest may thereby be left behind, effectively suppressed, as a purely comparative matter. It becomes harder to see the value in investing - time, effort, energy - into something that will not pay off immediately, and only - albeit exponentially - benefit us over a longer period of time.

Short Term Ability vs Long Term Skill

If there’s anything of unique, meaningful value that I most have to share with others, it’s in matters relating to the importance of artistic practise as a process to develop more than just mechanical skill through our techniques, approaches and methodologies. I do equate skill development to value, but not in the more traditional - most would say outdated - manner of simply thinking that art is more valuable when the practitioner is more skilled - although vocationally, there is some merit to this line of thought. Regardless, it goes far beyond that, and I’ve been gently encouraging people to discover these benefits for nearly 15 years in my facilitation practise. It is not my position that only art that looks good, or is traditionally beautiful, or naturalistic or accurate should be considered true art, or better art. It is my position that the process of developing unique, discrete mechanical skills and learning through art adjacent process-based practise is the foundation of a very powerful form of Long Term Skill development.

What do I mean when I say Long Term Skills? I’ll write a more thorough note on this soon, but for now - and through the lens of a Vocational Artist - you can think of a Long Term Skill as one that:

• continues to evolve and develop even when you’re not practising
• helps provide a framework for you to learn more deeply about other, often completely unrelated, topics and practises
• is universal, and can be applied to any new situation or problem or unrelated application or piece of software
• often helps you do completely unrelated tasks better, or more effortlessly, or with greater nuance and heightened sensitivities
• will always provide better results relative to the amount of effort invested in it
• greatly improves problem solving skills - vocationally, yes, but also very often in matters completely unrelated to vocational blockers
• continuously heightens ones insights into challenges and solutions, while simultaneously encouraging the development of ones own unique soft skills, thereby making practitioners much better equipped to move onto lead type roles as their vocational journeys progress.

It is also my position that - again, through the lens of a Vocational Artist - the use of Generative AI technologies for the purposes of producing art, does not give its practitioners the same access to these Long Term Skills. Generative AI has commonly be presented to the general public, and sold to artists, as an extension of their powers: to imagine, to visualise, to be more productive and efficient, to make new meanings, to create new art. Like all technologies, it is an amplifier of our abilities to do things. But if technologies can amplify some of our abilities, they will also suppress, or filter, others. Even for established artists, familiar with a broad range of techniques and deadline considerations and workflows and pipelines, Generative AIs capabilities can very effectively make it seem as though it is simply complementing one’s own innate abilities. But I believe its near zero-latency workflow, its entirely non-aesthetic interpretations of artist control in the form of input and output conditioning, and increasingly more users moving to closed, proprietary solutions, strips those users of more opportunities for meaningful skill development than the ones they gain. To this end, I believe Generative AI technologies simply grant its practitioners temporary Short Term Abilities; they do not promote Long Term Skill development, and in the instances where one is fully committed to closed, proprietary services, the Short Term Abilities its users are allowed to access are often not even universal enough to be applicable across other services, and sometimes don’t even survive generational updates within the service they use. It is an alluring, yet deceptive, and because of this, innately problematic technology for all vocational artists.

So Who Are These Notes For?

If you consider yourself an artist, a designer, if you are working in VFX, are an illustrator, a photographer, a musician, an architect, or an established, aspiring or enthusiast practitioner in any other creative visual/pictorial field, this series explores critical approaches and tools for you to incorporate into navigating that field, and these technologies, in a post-Generative AI world.

If you are working with Generative AI in a Vocational capacity in any of the above mentioned fields, from an enthusiast all the way up to an established level, this series is absolutely for you, especially if you are an aspiring or student practitioner.

If you are a Vocational Artist that is not working with Generative AI technologies in any capacity, and currently has either:

• no interest in, and largely indifferent towards
• some curiosity towards incorporating into your own work
• violent opposition towards

Generative AI, it’s my position that you are still going to be directly impacted by it, and it is my goal to help you better clarify your own feelings towards these technologies, so you can make better informed decisions about how you engage with the challenges that larger scale commercial adoption of them will likely create. At the very least, it is my intention with this series to also make you feel much better about your own form of practise, and hopefully make you even more excited to be an artworker in your field, and to give you some hope if you’re feeling otherwise a little exhausted by all the noise.

If you are a Contemporary Artist working with Generative AI, from an enthusiast all the way up through to an established level, you might find some of my technical and aesthetic insights interesting, however they will be very grounded in a form of enquiry focused heavily on more traditional skill and technique based concerns, alongside more conventional matters of aesthetic considerations, and will regularly factor in concerns of commerce and employment that may have nothing to do with you and your concerns. I’ll try to add a Contemporary Artist tag to all the notes that I feel might have relevance to your practise.

This Is Great, But I Like My Summaries In Table Form

To make all of this even clearer, allow me to firmly plant the Malcolm In The Middle theme song into your head for the rest of the day, and provide a table that answers the question “If I am a (Model/Established/Student/Aspiring/Enthusiast) (Vocational/Contemporary) artist, will I get any value out of what you’re about to share?”