Artists in the Eyes of Children – Semiotic Analysis of the Meanings about Artists Constructed by Children

The problem around which this study was constructed is the contemporary art and a person, who creates this art – an artist, and their authentic perception by the child. A modern vision of the child too often shows the artist in a distorted, incomplete or reduced way. This kind of children knowledge, based on the patterns and stereotypes, reduces the reflectivity of children, unnecessarily distorts their judgment and closes the road ahead to a full and critical participation in the world. The study is based on the analysis of interviews and children’s drawings centered around the perception of the profile of an artist by children. It results from the analysis of the research material gathered during the study that this is a stereotypical vision, and the artist is still associated with a person who remains beyond the reach of “normal” society. The conducted research shows the diversity of the types of meanings that children aged 5–7 attribute to the term “artist” and “artistry”. The naive ideas on this subject created by children prove to be a collection of beliefs of a partially common and often completely different nature. For a pedagogue, the ultimate purpose of the research is to obtain knowledge which will allow effective changes in education, in this case, in art education. The investigation of meanings which children attribute to concepts concerning the artistic phenomena may allow to create a strategy of transmission of knowledge of art history and to design the creative activities connected with the broadly-understood visual arts.