Fry's and Bell's Take on Art

These articles really make me proud to consider myself an artist. They know very well who an artist is, and how they conceive their art. Fry called them "prophets, the articulate soul of mankind, and protestant." I liked Bell's quote, which he states that an artist may fall in love with anything, always being thrown into a state of mind, and finds any inspiration to express his art. We call this A.D.D.
Fry does make the sad observation that only a small amount of artists really understand art. Art takes commitment, and saying that it is, "at the mercy of the lowest common denominator of their individual natures, which is dominated by fear, and compromise." I understand this very well.
The socialist understanding of an Artist can be hard to deal with sometimes. The need to eat can really drive an artist away from what they want to create. However, like Fry said, an artist has to be committed to succeed. Even if no one knows their name before their dead. The Art was created by the artist, hence the aesthetic is also the artist, for himself or others.