Artists and Projects

Artist is a descriptive term applied to a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art. It is also used in a qualitative sense of a person creative in, innovative in, or adept at, an artistic practice.

Most often, the term describes those who create within a context of 'high culture', activities such as drawing, sculpture, acting, dancing, writing, filmmaking and music — people who use imagination, and talent or skill, to create works that can be judged to have an aesthetic value. Art historians and critics will define as artists those who produce art within a recognised or recognisable discipline.

The term is also used to denote highly skilled people in non-"arts" activities, as well — crafts, medicine, alchemy, mechanics, mathematics, defense (martial arts) and architecture, for example. The designation is applied to illegal activities, like a "scam artist".

There is no consensus about what constitutes "art" or who is, or is not, an "artist". Often, discussions on the subject focus on the differences between "artist" and "technician" or "entertainer," or "artisan," "fine art" and "applied art," or what constitutes art and what does not.

The Oxford English dictionary, cites broad meanings of the term "artist,"

• A learned person or Master of Arts.
• One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, astrology, alchemy, chemistry.
• A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice - the opposite of a theorist.
• A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic.
• One who makes their craft a fine art.
• One who cultivates one of the fine arts - traditionally the arts presided over by the muses.

(referenced from: C. T. Onions (1991). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press Oxford. ISBN 0-19-861126-9.)

In Greek the word "techně" is often mistranslated into "art." In actuality, "techně" implies mastery of a craft (any craft.) The Latin-derived form of the word is "tecnicus", from which the English words technique, technology, technical are derived. Our word art is derived from the Latin "ars", which, though literally defined means "skill method" or "technique", holds a connotation of beauty.

Many contemporary definitions of "artist" and "art" are highly contingent on culture, resisting aesthetic prescription, in much the same way that the features constituting beauty and the beautiful cannot be easily standardized without corruption into kitsch.

Examples of art and artist

• Actor: Laurence Olivier
• Architect: Antonio Gaudi
• Ballet: Vaslav Nijinsky
• Calligraphy: Hokusai
• Choreographer: Martha Graham
• Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
• Computer programming: Donald Knuth
• Dancer: Isadora Duncan
• Entertainer: PT Barnum
• Fashion designer: Pierre Cardin
• Game designer: Shigeru Miyamoto
• Horticulture: André le Nôtre
• Illusionist: Houdini
• Industrial designer: Pininfarina
• Jeweller: Fabergé
• Martial Arts: Miyamoto Musashi
• Movie director: Sergei Eisenstein
• Muralist: Alicia Miranda
• Musician: Niccolo Paganini
• Novelist: Dostoevsky
• Musical instrument maker: Stradivari
• Orator: Cicero
• Painter: Leonardo da Vinci
• Photographer: Robert Mapplethorpe
• Pianist: Glenn Gould
• Playwright: Harold Pinter
• Poet: William Shakespeare
• Singer: Maria Callas
• Sculptor: Michelangelo Buonarotti
• Storyteller: el-Gahshigar

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Artist

For the form of US public housing, see housing projects. For computer software for project management see project management software. For WikiPedia projects, see Wikipedia:WikiProject.

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. Temporary means that the project has an end date. Unique means that the project's end result is different than the results of other functions of the organization.

It can also comprise an ambitious plan to define and constrain a future by limiting it to set goals and parameters. The planning, execution and monitoring of major projects sometimes involves setting up a special temporary organization, consisting of a project team and one or more work teams. A project usually needs resources.

The word project comes from the Latin word projectum from projicere, "to throw something forwards" which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes something that precedes the action of the next part of the word in time (paralleling the Greek πρό) and jacere, "to throw". The word "project" thus actually originally meant "something that comes before anything else is done". When the word was initially adopted, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project was called an object. This use of "project" changed in the 1950s when several techniques for project management were introduced: with this advent the word slightly changed meaning to cover both projects and objects. However in certain projects there may still exist so called objects and object leaders, reflecting the older use of the words.

One may also think in terms of platonism, where ideas from the realm of ideals are projected onto the physical world. (See: Plato's allegory of the cave.)

Particularly liked by Western business, projects can subdivide into sub-projects and spawn an industrial sub-culture of project planning and project management, all oblivious to more holistic developments.

Some feel this habit of short-termism has permeated economic planning and personal growth to the detriment of cyclical and multi-cultural world views. Alternatives to project-centric planning include trend-oriented goal-setting and directional planning.

However, this view is contentious, and indeed industrial program management and portfolio management represent ways of administering a range of projects to fulfil an over-arching strategy.

Notable projects include:

• Manhattan Project: Developed the first nuclear weapon
• Polaris missile project: an ICBM control system
• Human Genome Project: To map the human genome
• Project Apollo: Landing a man on the moon

Compare

campaign, process, program (management)

External links

• Project Planning

• Project Management Tutorial

• Project Management Knowledge Base

See also

• list of project management topics
• project planning
• Enterprise Project Management (EPM)
• Wikipedia development projects