Announcing that you’re embarking on a career as an artist may well alarm your parents – will you really be warm enough in a garret darling? – and perhaps with good reason, now more than ever. With subsidies for the arts in higher education under attack, and that part of the art world that makes money – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin – a charmed circle entered through luck and connections maybe more than talent, one could forgive aspiring artists for plumping for a career in the ‘creative industries’ instead.

More profoundly, young artists might struggle to understand just what being an artist even means. Since Warhol at least, the line between art and big business has been blurred, but today there seems even more confusion about the value of art and the associated profession. Arts institutions have in recent years increasingly made use of instrumental ends – promoting social inclusion, active citizenship, and so on – to justify state funding. A young artist today often seems more like a ‘cultural manager’, looking for money to support his or her next ‘project’. Others ‘working in the arts’ are as likely to be administrators as practitioners, while the seemingly ever-expanding creative industries include ‘video games artists’ as well as painters, sculptors and conceptual artists. It can seem a long way from a time when the aspiration to be an artist was a calling, something one just had to do, no matter how scant the rewards.

The late philosopher of art, Denis Dutton, pointed out that art is not something that can be clearly defined because it covers so many areas of human activity and experience. At the same time he argued there are people who are called artists because they have a specific set of skills and ideas: possibly even an instinct for art. Are such people – with the right mix of skill, imagination and inspiration – likely to want to be an artist against a cultural backdrop that struggles to justify the arts in their own terms, and finds great difficulty in using terms like beauty, truth and transcendence? Should we even worry about this? Maybe artists are always born not made and will struggle on, funding and cultural expectations aside? Is it a mistake to ask what the point is when maybe art has always been useless (although beautiful)? Is there any point in being an artist today?