Moebius and Syd Mead are not special effects artists. I don’t know how personally knowledgeable Jim Henson was about special effects, but the overwhelming majority of actual special effects output from the Creature Shop would have been done by a small army of anonymous artists. Likewise, George Lucas is not a special effects artist. He founded ILM with his money, not his skills.

Now or then, you’ll rarely find a special effects person who is a “true” artist, because special effects is an applied art. Someone like Moebius will have a personal vision because his job is to make original comics and other art that has a strong personal vision. The job of the special effects artists is to interpret and execute the vision of the director (or whoever), not their own. Same for graphic design or illustration. Even for architecture which is closer to art, the “art” part of the building’s design will come from one or a few people, the rest of the execution of the design will come from possibly hundreds of technical people, and the building will be built by construction workers who are typically hostile to art.

I would even argue that today technology has made it so that more of the people doing effects have artistic backgrounds. The people who did practical effects were the kids who were into chemistry sets. But I think today the special effects artists are more likely to be kids who were into drawing and writing. A teenager can have the same programs as the big studios on his laptop and he can make great looking stuff without encountering or being interested in technical stuff.

I think it’s similar with video games. It used to be that video games were made by programmers, and that there were literally no artists involved. Nowadays a teenager can make a simple but good looking video game without any programming knowledge using the same game engines that the big studios use.

I also think that special effects are reaching a point of maturity because the effects are so realistic that the movie going crowds are no longer impressed. It used to be that a single special effect in a big budget movie would drive all interest in it. A good example is Tron which is basically a feature length tech demo, or all those 80s fantasy movies where the big seller was that the puppets were slightly less terrible looking than before. The most recent movie that I can think of where the special effects themselves were a main attraction was Avatar. I think we’re entering a post-special effects age.

Yes I agree that most of the practical effects of yore were also done by technicians, I’m just speculating about why the creative vision behind the effects is so inferior nowadays to the films of the 70s – 80s, that it might be because cg made achieving these impressively realistic effects easy, that the people and studios best able to pull them off were dominated by people with advanced technical skills, and not necessarily the best artistic vision. In essence, that the race for better tech marginalized the role of artistic vision, and that that is the reason we don’t currently see artistic luminaries in Hollywood design and why there are no films that have compelling aesthetic styles these days, like the high tech rubbish of pacific rim for instance. Maybe the effects are technically good, but alien or blade runner are much more original, evocative, and powerful.

If the barometer for what makes a “true” artist is authorship and individual vision, then we’re going to have to excise a large swathe of great artists to fit this definition, a definition that didn’t exist until Modern art came along and tried to rewrite definitions to suit itself. Or we can see it for the rubbish sentiment it is.

And there are illustrators and designers who are sought out for their personal vision. E.g. Frank Frazetta was known for painting covers that often had nothing to do with the story on the pages. The publisher just wanted his art gracing their books.

A painting of a harbor use always art, just like a poorly written story is still a work of literature, whether it’s a work of quality, good art as it were, is an entirely separate question, and one that, in the end, is almost entirely subjective. For me, the best art conveys emotion, individual style, and or original concepts. Impressionist painting is great because of the lyrical way they capture light and atmosphere, not because they are making a statement about the nature of art. and as for your definition it’s unclear, since everything conveys content of some type.

A lot of the meaning of Impressionism does come from technique, and often times the meaning of art is a critical response to other art (kind of meta). The technique (abstracting the image/lighting into shapes of color, and allowing the paintness of the paint to be seen) and the selection of subject matter (everyday city life, country life, and mundane nature. repainting the same subject in a series) were both purposeful responses to the established art world.

50 years later you have painters making the statement that subject matter is not a required element of painting by painting pure compositions. A Renaissance architect makes a room with certain proportions because of their belief that proportion/math is an expression of the underlying divine natural order of the universe, and so that room may be art. Someone in a different time and place coincidentally making a room with the same proportions does not make it art.

If an unmade bed is a suitable medium for communicating a particular idea it is art, but not everyone in the world is an artist for producing an unmade bed every morning. Poetry is made out of words, and anything *can* be poetry, but not every shopping list is poetry. If I ask someone “why is this art?” and they say “because the painter was famous and made pretty paintings” then that artist had better have been an 19th century Aesthetic. And you can pit Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin into a death match against each other but they’re both artists.

I do think that a lot of what is being shown as art nowadays is actually pseudo-intellectual posturing, and that there is not any actual content being expressed. And because I believe that art is something that communicates things, whatever is being communicated should be detectable and should be direct (even if it’s a statement about indirectness, the fact that that is the topic should be communicated directly).

An ironic thought popped into my head though. There’s complaints that the arms race of flashy photorealism makes movies less artistic, while for a long stretch of history, art was nothing but an arms race of flashy realism.

All that said, while my definition does exclude a lot of things casually considered art (like most of deviant art), it does include a lot of things that aren’t given the dignity, like a lot of memes. Memes have most of the components of art and function similarly. If I knew a teenager who was really good at making memes I would encourage them to go to art school. I’m not picky about the medium. I’m also not picky about the content, and I recognize that there are grey areas about what counts as content. There are also some types of content that we might understand intuitively but might not be articulate enough to put into concrete explanations.