Is Bob Dylan an artist?

Contemporary Review, June, 2004 by Michael Karwowski

                     And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

The scaffolding of Bob Dylan's great songs is concerned solely with reality and illusion. Sin, virtues and graces, the whole panoply of conventional religious morality, do not even enter into the equation. His inspired songs have to do with the way things are, not with the way we would like them to be. If that, rather than the stylistic fetishes of the critics and academics, is what makes an artist, then Bob Dylan is not just the creator of an artistic medium that has dominated world popular culture for the past half century, he is also an artist of rare quality.

Dylan's Visions of Sin. Christopher Ricks. Viking. [pounds sterling]25. 517 pages. ISBN 0-670-80133-X.