Artist

Art assumes a definite level of skill. However, too much skill makes one's activity craftsmanship rather than art. The artist is a combination of the professional and the amateur.

Professionalism and professionality

These concepts are often mixed --- though they refer to quite different ideas. Professionalism means a high level of skill achieved through much learning and exercise. Professionality means gaining one's living by doing something. A professional artist sells his or her creative abilities to earn some money --- just like a worker sells his/her productive force for his/her wage. However, being a professional artist does not mean possessing any special skills or experience --- one is merely licensed to do something, joining a trade community.

As a rule, professional artists form a kind of caste within the society --- and this isolated social layer tends to degrade, like any other caste. The professionals have to defend their priviledged positions, and the only way they can do it is to prevent other people from accessing any information related, the accessories required, and the audience.

Who can be an artist?

Since, at the syncretic level, the aesthetic is not separated from the everyday activities of the people, one can expect that anybody can behave in the universal way, thus virtually becoming an artist, a scientist, or a philosopher. Further, since the universal is always universal, the art of a genius is in no way better than the art of an amateur --- as long as the aesthetic content is concerned. So, the only correct question may be: Why are some people more productive than the others --- that is, why do they produce more art?

Most aesthetic schools tend to attribute this difference to the natural (biopsychological) predisposition of the people to the specific kinds of activity, or to an interference of some "supreme" force. Since Unism considers the level of subjectivity and reason as qualitatively different from the biological level, the artistic creativity cannot be reduced to physiology. More of that, physiological convenience to do something makes it more difficult for a person to do it in the artistic way, since if the ease in the activity does not come from the conscious effort if cannot be human enough. As for the higher force, the only such force can be the influence of the society --- and the individual differences in creativity should be understood on the basis of the current economical and social development.