Indeed, this year was rife with some great and relatively diverse popular music, and it's high time we give some artistic cred not just to the capital-A Artistes who care not for the embrace of the masses but also to the hit makers who have, let's face it, probably shaped the future of wedding receptions for decades to come.
Cleopatra here is an artiste, an acrobat, a performer of the pornographic, a mistress of the erotic/consumerist nexus: for Antony, she dissolves a "priceless pearl" in a glass of wine.
They had a New York decorator and, under him, an artiste of a paperhanger.
However, when we saw Ms Aguiari she pointed out that she wasn't a commercial artist, she was an artiste - which we completely understood.
But when a travelling show passes through town, she runs away with an artiste in a cowboy hat and follows him — and her passion — down the abyss to her degradation.
To be sung off the stage, no doubt, by Rebecca Ferguson – not Sting's or Adrian Edmondson's or Jools Holland's daughter for a change, but an artiste of amazing skill and promise who, without The X Factor, would probably get no nearer to fame than handing back some dumb WAG's dry cleaning.
Fortunately, Zaillian and Price are working with a remarkably nimble ensemble, and in Turturro they have not just an actor but an artiste.
But when they advance to being an artiste they may then be called a stortist.
They are visited by Doug, who is beginning to shed his most egregiously dippy qualities, and Daphne, now a self-involved dance major cultivating the high-strung temperament of an artiste; she is, in other words, lost as ever.
Shia "I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE" LaBeouf has an explanation for his increasingly erratic behavior -- he is an artiste.
As Gabrielle, Christopher McCann is locked into a grimace and a stiff-spined arrogance; John Gould Rubin plays Domenica with the blase presumption of an artiste who is predictably skewered by intrusive moments of insecurity.
