The third direction art may take is the one of the artist-craftsman. Because of the increased importance of self-referential and conceptual art, craftsmanship has lost much of its high value among artists during the second half of the twentieth century. The last few decades however, artists with a keen interest in craftsmanship began to move in front. They began to reinstitute old techniques and developed new, more positive attitudes towards craftsmanship.

Artists who actually do their own work with their own hands and who derive their identity and success partly from their craftsmanship are typical of this new or rather reinvented type of artist. It is because of them that paintings, ballets and musical compositions are again allowed to be admired for their technical virtuosity and can be considered ‘beautiful’ again according to some critics.

The renewed passion for craftsmanship could have a sobering influence on the arts and it could eventually make the economy of the arts less exceptional. Even though craftsmen need some modest kind of magic to showoff their tricks, their primary ambition is to be good at what they do. In general, they have no real desire to be stars. They know the value of their time and materials and so they ask fair prices for their work. They have no great need to put art on a pedestal, make it over into something sacred, or deny the economy.

The artist-entertainer is our fourth type of artist. Creative artists, who set out to entertain the public, are universal and timeless, as the likes of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Dickens clearly demonstrate. In the course of the twentieth century, however, entertainers gradually began to be taken less and less seriously and often found themselves outside the realm of (high) art.

Artist-entertainers seem to undermine the exceptional nature of the economy of the arts because they consciously set out to please their audiences. They orient themselves toward their audiences and thus, towards the market. This applies as much to the circus clown performing for a small audience as to the pop musician, whose hit record can be heard on radio and television almost any time of the day. As entertainer artists, they often tried hard to lose their weight, many alternative are being use such as coconut oil weight loss, as the result of giving the best to the audience.

Nevertheless, these artists do not really challenge the exceptional economy of the arts. Even though they are oriented toward consumers, at the same time they tend to deny the economy. They resist the secularization of art because they evidently profit from the notion of art being sacred. At the same time, they probably stand a better chance of being the model for the artist of the future than the other three types.