“He was an industrial designer, OK? Are such animals artists? I dunno. One renowned designer of signs, placards, posters, wine labels, book covers, and menus, among other practical things, protested against being called an artist, saying he was an illustrator.”
Here we get into the vagaries of the word itself. You have to one side masters of high art like Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Michelangelo, which he clearly was not. But we also call carpenters artists, because they ply their craft as experts. Jobs was an artist in that sense, though I wouldn’t say his expertise was in design, a craft closer to high art than others, as such. I don’t actually know how closely he was involved in that process. But I do know that for the computer world, that sort of thing is the result of code, and that Jobs didn’t write code.
He was an idea man, and his ideas may have been the most perfeclty precise of any that a non-programmer could ever dream, without being an actual programmer. But still there’s that divide. Shakespeare could have had the plot, themes, characterizations, etc., of “Hamlet” explained to him in detail, but he had to actually write it. And the artistry is in the writing.
If Jobs was an artist, it was as a dreamer. A visionary, a guru, a seer. Someone who could see where the market was headed. Moreover, as an administrator. Not the sort of administrator who works as efficiently as possible, squeezing every last bit out of every last penny; I don’t think Apple even had a budget in its early years. No, he bossed via motivation. Surrounded himself with the highest talent and ran them like a slave driver with the whip of belief. Belief in himself, his ideas. It was a cult of personality.
Are cult leaders, even of the religion of technology, artists? Probably not.
It’s one thing to be an idea man, or a visionary, it’s a whole other kettle of fish, to make that vision a reality.
I cannot disagree, as I have big trouble with the word myself. Are popular musicians ‘artists’? Are producers of trashy cinema? Yeah, what is art? And, but, but, is it art?
A couple of months ago I went to as meeting of a photography group whose leader was a studio photographer of (presumably) art photography (as opposed to wedding photography and such.) I take a lot of photographs these days and have an educational background in the area. I have trouble calling myself an ‘artist’. Like the four others there I brought a pen drive with a few photos to be subjected to critique. He loaded it onto his Mac, yes, computer with a big screen, where they must reside to this day, dammit, and started critiquing. Only one of my photos had identifiable people in it, a scene I captured of a father and daughter in motion and interesting poses that provoked some thoughts about the sceneto the viewer. It was also the only one of the 30 or so photos we critiqued during the session that had identifiable people (i.e not some small shadows of figures out in the distance.)
Oh, boy, did I provoke this fellow, who had some Sanskrit sign tattoo on the side of his bald head, and whose persona triggered slightly my gaydar. My photo did not qualify as “art photography”, it was a mere “family snapshot”, he went on. And went on for a bit. It seemed to me that I hit some raw nerve in the man. But I consider all my photos, including those that he actually praised, as “snapshots”. Unlike he in his studio, I don’t spend more than a few seconds, or maybe a minute to compose and shoot a photograph. Oh, I have my favorite spots to which I return and endlessly retake photos, seeking that perfect composition and light, yes. Does all that make me an artist? I don’t think so, but the question is something of a struggle. And this particular fellow had for himself a very definite answer. I don’t.