You are setting out to become artists or designers, or to work in the media, so you will already have some idea of what these professions involve. The idea of what it means to be in these fields comes from the past, and therefore it is important to look at the past to see where these ideas have their origins. You need to develop a reflexive and critical understanding of your chosen field in order to grow within it.

Nowadays, your chosen career pathway will mean becoming a professional worker within the ‘culture industry’. This means that you will function as members of one aspect of the enormously complex economic structure that drives the developed world forward. This membership can take many different forms, from being hugely rich and successful artists and designers like Damien Hirst or John Maeda to being a teacher at an art school or someone who works in a café and paints whenever they have a free moment. What these people have in common is that they somehow identify with the labels ‘artist’ or ‘designer’.

First of all, we should be aware that what we mean when we say ‘artist’ is of recent historical origins and ‘designer’ is even more contemporary, while ‘media’ has been an important cultural category only since the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, these are all Western concepts. Before the fifteenth century in the West, as in the rest of the world (and also today in countries where the division of labour that is typical of Western capitalist economies is new), the difference between artists and designers didn’t exist, and the nature of the communications media was primitive and limited. The main social division was between those who produced ‘folk’ or popular artefacts or media and those who worked for the elite – for the court, the religious institutions and the wealthy.

Until the modern period, people involved in making visual images were more like what we today call craftspeople or artisans – they were skilled manual workers who produced products by hand for specific markets. Usually, these activities involved undergoing long apprenticeships with established ‘masters’ or workshops where the necessary skills could be learnt. Each member of a workshop had a different role to play that contributed to the making of the object – it was a collective or group enterprise, and usually no one bothered to give the object an attribution to a particular person, with the result that we usually don’t know who made what. In the past it was considered enough to know from which workshop or which particular region a work originated, because regions tended to specialise in different skills and styles. The social status of these craft workers was quite low, because anyone working with their hands was considered uneducated and vulgar. Sometimes these workshops were family businesses spanning several generations. Now and then, a very talented person could set up their own workshop. Where differences in talent came from was considered largely a question of the quality of training received, the ability to continue within the established tradition and willingness to fulfil the requirements of patrons – that is, the rich people or institutions who required the services of artefact-makers. Before the modern period, these important patrons were broadly of two kinds: ecclesiastic (that is, religious) and aristocratic. Gradually, a third group emerged: the merchant and middle class.

So, broadly speaking, the distinction we now make between artists and craftspersons did not exist in the past. And to understand what makes an ‘artist’ special we need to look at a revolutionary period in Western history – the Renaissance. It is during this period that we can say a manual job turned into a career, and, even more importantly, into a ‘calling’.

Having a career implies more than just earning a living. It also means that you believe that what you do will enhance your social status and lead to increased material prosperity. In order for a manual worker to transform what they do from mere manual work into a ‘career’, they must somehow persuade the clients for their work that it is of such importance that the clients will consider that the makers are very important members of society. The decisive move towards art as a career happened in seventeenth-century Holland. It was here, as the economic system we now call capitalism developed, that artists began to organise themselves into smaller and individualised workshops or studios, and to produce easel paintings on speculation. They no longer fulfilled commissions from aristocrats or religious organisations and instead produced portable paintings a client could then choose to buy. Image-makers became specialists in what we would today call ‘niche marketing’ – one artist specialised in paintings of landscape, another made portraits, while still another focused on still-life paintings of flowers. It became more common for one clearly named artist to make the whole work, whereas, before, a whole workshop had been involved. This is why we recognise people like the Dutch artist Rembrandt (1606–69) as similar to the modern idea of the artist. He seems to have functioned like an ‘artist’. However, when we look more closely at Rembrandt’s life story, we discover that there are major differences. For instance, Rembrandt still had a workshop of assistants, and he mostly painted commissions. Indeed, we can say that most artists before the nineteenth century behaved more like what we think of today as a merchant or a businessman – they aspired to be solidly respectable members of the new middle class, and, if they were very lucky, to even become members of the aristocracy, which is what everyone really wanted to be. How they achieved this enhanced social status was down to five things: gender (male), talent at object-making, being in the right place at the right time, an ability to sense what people wanted and an ability to endear oneself to the rich and powerful.

State-sponsored institutions arose within which to train and display this new kind of object-maker: art academies and art museums. The first art academy was founded in France in the seventeenth century, and the idea soon spread. Here students underwent rigorous training in order to acquire the skills necessary to compete in the art marketplace. This training centred on drawing from ‘life’ – on acquiring the ability to rationally analyse the human figure and reduce it to clear outline. The academies were reserved only for young men, and so, if we ask the question why there were no great women artists before the modern era, the answer is largely that they were barred from the training necessary to work as professional artists, in addition, of course, to being generally constrained by a social system that strictly segregated male and female roles and gave almost all the power to men.

It is important to stress that these developments first took place in Europe and then were exported to the ‘New World’ – America – and to those countries colonised by Western powers. They were very closely bound up with the economic system that has now come to dominate the world – capitalism. The workshop idea of the visual artefact-maker belongs to the pre-industrial era, when everything was handmade and localised. The idea of the artist as a person with a special career arose with the development of a stable marketplace, although still within a society where everything was hand-made, but the idea of the artist went through further changes with the coming of the industrial age and the technological age – our era. Now most things – including images – are made by machines, and the artist is obliged to compete with such products. Furthermore, within the context of greater literacy and improved technologies of reproduction, mass media emerged, and a market developed for visual productions that were geared towards the needs of the marketplace, and, in particular, in relation to the promotion of merchandise within a competitive free-market economy. The fields of advertising and publicity emerged. It was at this point, with the emergence of the mass media, that the category of ‘designer’ was established in distinction to ‘artist’. Whereas the artist worked within the context of an open and highly speculative market, the designer was someone who worked to a ‘brief’, or directly for a client.

The artist’s position as a special producer of cultural artefacts was closely tied to the development of the idea of a ‘calling’ – the belief that what an especially creative individual does is somehow fundamentally different from what is done by ordinary people. The most convincing way to suggest this was by claiming that what the artist made was better than anything a machine could make. Why was it better? First of all, because it was made by a person and not by a machine, but secondly, because it was created by someone who wasn’t just making a material object; he or she was also somehow capturing intangible qualities of the utmost importance. This meant that an artist was not just someone with an ability to draw, paint or sculpt well in order to produce a beautiful object, but someone who communicated values that, to a large extent, had traditionally been the province of religion. The ‘artist’ was someone in touch with ‘higher powers’ or forces different from those experienced by ‘ordinary’ people.

In fact, this idea was already implicit in the era before the modern age, and we can see a similar development occurring in non-Western cultures, such as in East Asia. For example, it isn’t unusual to read in old descriptions of the work of image-makers in both Western and East Asian cultures that the producers of these artefacts were ‘divinely’ inspired – that they had a ‘god-given gift’. The maker created like the gods created. This meant that they were imbued with a special talent that set them apart from other people, and that they did something that wasn’t entirely utilitarian, useful and practical. They made things that were considered inspired or transcendent.

But the problem for the idea of a new higher purpose of art was that an artist was still someone who produced material things, and this materiality challenged the artest’s status as communicators of a more immaterial and noble dimension one might call ‘spiritual’, ‘lofty’ or ‘eternal’. On the other hand, poets and musicians – that is, people who used the invisible spoken and written word or sound to exalt, inspire, terrify, calm or otherwise transform us – had a very high social status. This was because they had the advantage of working directly with the mind and imagination rather than making things that were formed with the raw materials also necessary for the construction of everyday and practical objects. So, even in ancient times, poets were considered to be more refined people, and closer to the social class who profited from manual labour rather than engaging in it.

It was therefore necessary for artists to turn themselves into ‘intellectuals’. They had to show that they too were ‘mind’ workers, and not just manual workers. They did this by conceptualising what they did. ‘Conceptualising’ means that they became reflexive about their activity, and they became self-conscious. For example, they established a history of their field of work, giving it a form that was based on the idea of progress towards goals that were nothing to do with earning a living or decorating palaces, churches or houses. Thus, from the moment when artists sought to distinguish themselves from craftspeople, it was also essential for them to conceptualise and theorise art practice, and so ideas became almost as important, and sometimes even more important, than any technical or manual skill.

In fact, this had also developed in China as long ago as the tenth century; images and artefacts were divided into those made by ‘literati’ and amateur connoisseurs of the ruling elite, on the one hand, and professional makers on the other. The former group possessed high social value while the latter was considered of much lower cultural value. However, in Western European this move towards a kind of intellectualised ‘conceptual art’ began in the Renaissance, and it was then that the artist started to consider himself (it was a solidly male business) special – someone set apart from other object-makers.

For example, in 1500 the artist Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528) painted a self-portrait, and the symbolism he borrowed to depict himself derived directly from that traditionally employed to depict Jesus Christ. The message is clear: an artist is someone above the normal, a person with a ‘special calling’. But this division could have odd or ambivalent consequences. For instance, it became commonplace in the West to believe that the truly great artistic ‘genius’ was not likely to be recognised as a ‘genius’ in their own time. This was because their thinking and imaginations were supposed to be ahead of the rest of society – the ideas they promoted were too new and unsettling to be accepted by conventional taste. For some artists, it therefore became a badge of honour to fail at a socially valuable job, or to lack a respectable career. For instance, think of Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–90); his self-portraits also often suggest Christ, but now it is the Christ who suffers and is rejected.

This development is linked to the idea of the ‘bohemian’ artist, a word originally referring to a region of east-central Europe and used to describe someone like a gypsy who refused to conform to conventional social norms or who was not tolerated by society. In the early nineteenth century, during the period dominated by Romanticism, this idea was adopted by artists. They too were ‘non-conformists’, living at the margins of respectable society, or visionaries who were ahead of their time, who inevitably suffered because they refused to accept the repressive moral, religious and political status quo. However, these artists preferred to forget the fact that their profession had historically been developed to furnish the ruling elite with beautiful luxury goods.

As the nineteenth century progressed, two kinds of artist emerged: the traditionalist or ‘academic’ artists who tended to accept society as it was and therefore promoted the values associated with respect for tradition, and the ‘progressive’ or ‘avant-garde’ artists who often attached their ‘original’ visions to radical political agendas and were in rebellion against tradition. For them, art was deliberately designed to offend the ruling elite by not conforming to its standards of taste. Some artists deliberately mixed being an artist with being a kind of ‘priest’ or religious leader (e.g., Vincent van Gogh) – though not necessarily a ‘priest’ who followed any conventional religious beliefs. In other words, artists deliberately set out to oppose the more practical and useful goals originally intended for object-makers (such as earning a living by providing beautiful things) by claiming a powerful sense of ‘calling’. The results were often tragic, especially for the wives and children of such artists.

Several artists managed to play a number of roles simultaneously, and without anyone really noticing the contradictions. Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973), for example, was bohemian, avant-gardist and a bourgeois businessman all at the same time. Later, Andy Warhol (American, 1928–87) was honest about returning to the idea of an artist being someone who does a job, has a career and satisfies a clientele. But some would say that the results – what Warhol actually made – were a sad falling away from the more exalted purpose of art, which was perhaps being exemplified by a contemporary of Warhol, the German sculptor Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who declared that an artist is a kind of ‘shaman’, or a communicator with the realm of the sacred.

Today, in an age of incredible technological sophistication and global interconnectedness, the idea of the artist as someone somehow set apart from the rest of society may well have become outdated. In fact, the contemporary situation in some ways signals a return to the older idea of the artist and his workshop working together to produce things for a clientele. The British artist Damien Hirst (1965–) functions like this, as did Andy Warhol in his Factory. The assertion that artists should work alone and in opposition to society’s norms – that they are unique and special individuals – is being challenged by the recognition that it is necessary to engage with many different social groups and communities, both locally and across national boundaries and via the World Wide Web. The distinction between ‘artist’ and ‘designer’ collapses and these new culture-workers instead become facilitators, master planners and organisers.

It should therefore be remembered that looking at the evolution of the role of the makers of visual artefacts through history is only of limited value when it comes to understanding the contemporary ‘artist’ or ‘designer’. Things have changed enormously. Indeed, students of today are helping to create the future roles of artists and designers.

Finally, it is vital to remember again that this story is largely a Western story – albeit one that has been exported very successfully to the rest of the developed and the developing world, so that today we can talk of a global scene in which producers and markets function with remarkably similar characteristics whether they are in New York, London, Beijing or Mumbai. But, while the idea of the artist and designer comes from the West, it has acquired various kinds of hybrid form as it has travelled away from the centre. So, for example, it is worth thinking about the case of Australian Aboriginal art. In the late 1970s and 1980s, there emerged a powerful kind of painting produced by indigenous Australians that became extremely marketable on a global scale. In fact, no such ‘art’ had existed before within the societies of these people – there had been no paintings within their culture designed to be portable, like a painting on canvas. This was a transformation encouraged by the Aborigines’ Western teachers, who introduced canvas, and acrylic and oil paints. But the Aborigines embraced the new technology, and soon started producing some amazing art.

Today, some of the best art and design is coming not from the West but from places such as China, India and South America, and it is all becoming part of the great ‘mash-up’ on the World Wide Web, which has no geographical centre. It is being made by artists and designers who live nomadic lives, such as the Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco (1962–), who is equally at home in Mexico, New York and Paris and whose work reflects his cosmopolitan identity by drawing on a bewildering range of cultural resources in a wide variety of media, and by the Japanese-American graphic designer, computer scientist, academic and author John Maeda (1966–), who works in design, technology and leadership training in order to explore the intersections between fields that have traditionally been considered distinct. These artists-designers-facilitators are far indeed from Rembrandt doing commissions for rich Dutch merchants in Amsterdam, or van Gogh going crazy in the south of France, or Picasso enjoying the ‘high life’ in Paris.

So where do you as art, design or media students stand in relation to these histories? What you think about yourself as a student (and a soon-to-be-professional in the culture industry) comes from somewhere. It comes from a more or less conscious awareness of what ‘art’ and ‘design’ are.