Is It Possible To Be a Commercial Artist?: Dilemmas Faced by Advertising Industry Employees with Artistic Backgrounds in Poland

It has always been difficult to tell where art ends and the sell begins. In the vast majority of contemporary capitalist states, most people with a formal education in the fine arts work outside the art world. When trained artists decide to work outside the field of art, they have to agree to the market rules. They need to consider certain conventions, local cultural schemata, rules that apply to a particular product category, and, most importantly, the client’s point of view. It is no longer l’art pour l’art, and the problem of their artistic identity begins. As C. Wright Mills put it, a designer is a man in the middle, because “his art is a business, but his business is art.” The position of a “commercial artist” is a very difficult one because the adjective (“commercial”) completely changes the connotation of the noun (“artist”).