I read somewhere that Bob Dylan (a self-described "song and dance man") once tried to meet a girl in front of NYC's Metropolitan Museum by asking her "D'ya want to come in with me to look at some pretty pictures?"
Cute, and right. Better than "Come up and see my etchings." The young woman in question, if I recall the story right, said "No, thanks" to the scruffy little guy.
Like most people, I do not know what art means. It's maybe a useless word. "Craft" is a very useful word. "Creative" is a useless word unless applied to Michelangelo, Picasso, or Shakespeare, but even then I dislike the word.
From The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
I’m not sure that artist even makes sense as a term anymore, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it giving way before the former ("creator"), with its more generic meaning and its connection to that contemporary holy word, creative. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Powers of Two, last summer’s modish book on creativity, puts Lennon and McCartney with Jobs and Wozniak. A recent cover of this very magazine touted “Case Studies in Eureka Moments,” a list that started with Hemingway and ended with Taco Bell.
When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.
