What Does it Mean To Be an Artist?

By Sabrina Stevenson

For much of his career, Michelangelo was not considered an artist. Painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period were instead classified as artisans, or skilled craftsmen. Art was a technical skill, crafted over decades of hard work in workshops with no expectation that anyone would even know your name. Yet, with the rise of humanism in the 16th century, artists started to be recognised for their intellectual and creative capacities as well, finally donning craftsmen like Michelangelo as ‘artists.’ Being an artist was no longer just an occupation, but an identity; an identity now worth signing your name to at the bottom of your work.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

So what does it mean to take on the identity of an ‘artist’ today? The evolution of technology has certainly made this a much more complicated question to answer. ‘Artist’ could now refer to a graphic designer, photographer, actor, director; all roles that did not exist in Michaelangelo’s time. So has the entire definition of artist shifted then too? Or have the core fundamentals of what make you an ‘artist’ remained the same? 

In an attempt to come up with an answer to these questions, I found interviews with artists in the film industry particularly intriguing, as film uniquely combines the fine arts and ever-evolving technology to create the films we enjoy as art.

Director Guillermo Del Toro (Frankenstein, 2025) remarked that his passion for stop-motion animation led him to ‘found the beginnings of the stop motion movement in Mexico,’ simply because there was no scene for it at the time. He worked against incredible financial troubles to get his films made, running out of money making his first film Cronos and landing in half a million dollars in debt. The film was then rejected by the Mexican Institute of Art on the basis that it was ‘not art.’ It was also rejected by Cannes, until the head of Critics Week saw it by accident. It went on to win twelve international prizes and be the first Mexican film to win at Cannes in 30 years.

Still from Cronos (1992): The Guardian

Is this finally the moment when Del Toro could call himself an artist, when his name was recognized by other artists? If anything, it proves that attempting to classify and label art is irrelevant. The entire reason his films made it to Cannes was because he pushed back against a system that didn’t want him there. Mexico had no place for his art until he created it, and no place in the film world until he put it out there. 

Chloé Zhao (Hamnet, 2026) demonstrates a similar tenacity against hardship in the pursuit of art. During the shooting of her first film, her entire apartment was robbed and countless hours of footage was lost – ‘the drives, the laptop, everything gone.’  Rather than let it halt production though, she picked up right where she left off and began production again with the money she still had, under the mantra ‘You know the story you want to tell’. She states that one of the reasons she is so proud of her film Hamnet is because of its vulnerability, and is a moment of not ‘put[ting] the mask on, no matter how risky it is.’

The Hollywood Reporter

These artists did not just dream of making art, they went out and tackled it like it was the only thing they would ever do. And then it was. Work may no longer be confined to the 16th century workshop, yet becoming an artist is still a decades long journey full of hard work and dedication. Though Zhao and Del Toro represent only a small part of the vastly diverse art world and the people in it, their stories tell us that your ability to surmount obstacles as an artist is as much a skill that needs developing as something like painting or film directing.

Being an artist isn’t about chasing success, but having the bravery to chase the act of creating more than anything else.