An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only. The term is often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (less often for actors).
"Artiste" (the French for artist) is a variant used in English only in this context. Use of the term to describe writers, for example, is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like criticism.
(Excerpt from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist)