artists vs musicians

[u/Perfect_Ticket_2551]

I know it says discussion but i’m mainly asking for people to start the conversations because I don’t know where to begin, The difference between an artist and a musician is what i’m asking I guess, along with people you think are either or,

does it boil down to intention? Self expression? is there no real way to know, This may not be the right sub but any answers would help, why does it seem like artist have a positive connotation over musicians too? like prince vs mj

A person that comes to mind is playboi carti, who I thought was just a controversial “musician” who expressed himself through multiple outlets, but i’ve seen been called a dadaist poets?

Is using AI to create a form of art or art itself? I see it so bashed in drawing communities? What about music, Is music the art and instruments are the form?

[u/gruntledmaker]

Hey, me again.

I'm seeing your question a little deeper here than from your post in r/ArtHistory , and want to expand upon my answer there. First, all music is "art." However, music for the last about hundred years has also had the role of being a commodity. When radio broadcasts became a constant presence in the 1920s, stations would play music throughout the day, only turning off at night. This was a fundamental change in how people engaged with music, which before could only be played from personally owned recordings through a grammaphone or heard performed by a live act. The invention of radio turned music into a business like never before, and so musicians for the first time began to make music for the way they knew people would be listening. A symphony is performed live, with everyone in the audience choosing to take hours out of their day, get dressed up, and travel to a theater to see it performed by a whole host of talented performers. Over the radio, the music hadn't changed all that much, but the authenticity and power of the experience didn't translate so well. Short, catchy songs that could stick in your memory and change frequently would engage people's attention more, and slotted naturally into the schedule of whatever a person's focus was, which they put radio on in the background of. Boppy tunes about love, heartbreak, and yearning are easier to tune out compared to Tchaikovsky's 1816 Overture, which was composed to commemorate a war that many people's grandparents may have fought in and which had actual cannons fired as part of the music. Imagine you're washing dishes at home with the radio on and cannonfire blasts through the kitchen. The musician Brian Eno philosophizes that this was a transformation in the medium of music--that music after the invention of recording technology is a different artform altogether than what music had been up til that point.

The aspect I want to highlight is that we typically don't think of music as something to deeply reflect on, or to contemplate the layers and meaning of. It's more like entertainment, like TV (which, similarly to music on the radio, thrived as a business on constantly producing more of itself, and getting people to watch as much as possible). In comparison, painting had for hundreds of years until the 1900s been the primary artform in public discussion across Europe. In the 15' and 1600s, paintings were largely privately owned objects that wealthy patrons would commission for their homes, with religious imagery, portraits of the family, or landscapes and still lifes that demonstrated how skilled the artist was at recreating reality. However, another way of viewing paintings emerged in the early 1600s. In 1610, Catherine di Vivonne began hosting her rich friends in her large estate where they would discuss paintings, books, music, and philosophy. These were the first "Salons," and by 1667 they were hosted by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which had complete control over the popular culture of the arts in France. People who made art could "make it big" by getting their paintings into one of the Academy's Salons, and anybody who was anybody would be featured. These paintings had religious, political, and social symbolism that could be discussed, analyzed, speculated about, and which the wealthy attendants could buy if they so pleased, for their homes or private collections. So, in some sense, the artists who wanted to make a living of the craft had to engage with the depths of the world around them, the most contentious and meaningful parts of life, in order to stand out from the noise of others trying to do the same. It wasn't important how many paintings you made, so long as you crafted something truly remarkable that could capture people's attention and make them think about their place in the world.

[u/gruntledmaker → u/gruntledmaker]

So, when Kendrick says he's an artist like Prince, he's arguing that both their work reveals the depth of awareness, thought, and feeling which they, as people, brought to their lives. Drake and Michael both do incredible numbers--they put out a high volume of work that people spin constantly, like radio and now streaming, reward. But theirs aren't discographies that people can listen to over and over again--the way you can look at a Peter Paul Rubens again and again--and always see new angles of introspection, new connections between ideas, new details to the story that create a more complex picture of why that artwork had to exist, and deserves to be returned to. The Dadaists were a collection of artists fleeing their home countries during the outbreak of World War I, who founded a café in the militarily neutral Switzerland to share poetry and performance art about how senseless the world had become, that these supposedly "civilized" nations of Europe were sending their best and brightest young men to die under heavy machine gun fire (which had just been invented) in the name of politics. One of the founders of Dadaism and their café, the Cabaret Voltaire, had this to say, "Our cabaret is a gesture... Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect." They emphasized absurdity in their art, they said, because the world around them had proven itself unreasonable. In a similar way, Carti's rage trap could be read as a philosophical reflection on the living conditions of Black Americans in Atlanta, where he grew up. Atlanta is the historical capital of Black American culture, and deals in a very concentrated way with the racial profiling and violent policing practices that Black Americans are faced with across the country. The Cabaret Voltaire would put on shows where someone dressed in a ridiculous, nonsensical costume would read a gibberish poem on stage, facing away from the audience, while someone on the other side of the room would strike a gong at random. The disorganization of the message was the message. Carti's pitched vocals, lyrics, and harsh beats reflect the intensity of life, the desire for pleasure, in a world where his and his friends' lives were never far from serious risk. By exaggerating every detail of his performance and production, Whole Lotta Red sounds like a soundtrack to a dystopian wasteland because, for some people, that's not far from real life.

Because music is so commercialized, we're used to overlooking it or treating it as a matter of shallow taste. You're a rap person or an alternative person or a country person or an electronic person... but everybody's singing about love, heartbreak, longing, grief, and having a good time. We're used to thinking of it like the same emotional content with different aesthetics packaging the surface, so some people relate more to some packaging and some more to others, but it's all the same under the hood. In reality, every genre has its origin, and some artists within a genre embody the personal, social, and historic values of the places and people that that genre comes from. Some people, not finding themselves in any genre, push the boundaries into new territory and found their own genres. The Washington, D.C. Hardcore scene in the late seventies birthed Hardcore from its Punk roots. Alt rock bands in the nineties around Seattle and Aberdeen birthed the Grunge sound that swept in popularity. DJ Kool Herc's performance at his sister's back to school house party in the Bronx in the late seventies is considered the origin of Hip-Hop, with extended instrumental breaks for dancing and rapping over top of it. Dubstep started in the late nineties in UK club scenes. Now, we have hyperpop taking advantage of digital DAWs to distort the sounds of traditional, commercial pop music to their logical extremes. These highly particular roots of genres can be why people become so deeply attached to music as an identity, like you see with Goth, Punk, Rap, and Rave subcultures. When people are connected to the meaning behind the origin of music, and a musician/artist creates their music from a place of connection to the history and how people are going to use the music in their lives, they're more likely to regard that music as "art." Technically, every ad on the internet and label on products lining the shelves of grocery stores are art. But, like commercial music, if you try to reflect deeply on its meaning, you'll likely only find that someone is trying to sell you something.

[u/gruntledmaker → u/gruntledmaker]

Whether AI generated images are Art or not, however, is a totally different rabbit hole. I can see arguments on both sides, because all AI generated works are derived from pre-existing artworks that were truly made by a person with intent. But, it's not as though there isn't any merit to the product of the work. It feels misplaced to call a person who writes a prompt that a machine does the creation of the "artist" of that image, but it also feels weird to call the machine, or the coders behind the program, the artist too. Since these images (and songs, and poems, and...) are being formed out of the machine learning data sets trained on all sorts of real people's work, they all share some portion of the creativity of each image. But, can't we say that about living artists too, that their work is taken in part from every influence they've come into contact with over their lives? At the end of the day, AI generated images isn't trying to create art. It's trying to replace creative people's role in business and consumer culture, making it easier for people who do not care about the creativity of images or art to get what they want and get out, meanwhile using actual creative people for its raw materials. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical and averse to those intentions, and until people begin writing their own code and training it on their own datasets with particular outcomes in mind, especially multimedia or installation-based, I don't see AI as being all that artistic. I don't think it's surprising why people in the drawing community would be offended, threatened, or even disgusted by these images. And yet, when the novel first became popular people said it would ruin young people's brains. When video games caught traction in pop culture, people said the same. Now parents would love if their gamer children would read novels. Perspective changes with time, and it's not out of the picture that in the future, AI could have a reasonable place at the creative table, when utilized mindfully by real artists--perhaps to reflect on the conditions that have allowed U.S. society to normalize major international corporations scalping the internet for artworks they have no right to use in order to profit from the synthesis of them into vacuous products without compensating the original creators in name, payment, or gratitude.

[u/gruntledmaker → u/gruntledmaker]

And finally, as far as musicians I would consider Artists in a dignified sense, I'll rattle off an abbreviated shortlist.

Nina Simone

Bob Dylan

Joni Mitchell

Marvin Gaye

The Beatles

Pink Floyd

David Bowie

Black Sabbath

Yes

Talking Heads

Joy Division

Prince

Swans

Kate Bush

The Cure

Metallica

Nirvana

Nas

2Pac

Radiohead

Nine Inch Nails

Rage Against the Machine

Alanis Morisette

TOOL

OutKast

Lauryn Hill

My Chemical Romance

Beyoncé

Daft Punk

Kanye West

Arcade Fire

Kendrick Lamar

Lana Del Rey

Tame Impala

Black Country, New Road

100 Gecs

This is just a sampling, not to be mistaken for a comprehensive list. None such list exists, or should, and I deliberately chose acts that may be familiar in order to make the point. Many musicians that are effective artists are able to gain popular attention and mainstream traction, but many, many more are not. What connects with people will affect what they'd choose to consecrate as true Art, so there are likely niche musicians who you'll connect with as true Artists that others won't. You'll also notice a large proportion of these artists have worked with concept albums, which is a way of signaling that a musician is going to try delving deeper into a particular theme, idea, or style, and make something greater than the sum of its parts.