About 70 people crowded into the Robert Charles and Lorraine Bauer Duffy Family Gallery at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum on July 31 to contemplate the question “What is an artist?”

The evening was part of Forum 24, a summer-long series of events sponsored by the Provincetown Art Gallery Association, and this question was taken up as a reprise of the same one raised at the opening session of Provincetown’s Forum 49, an influential gathering held 75 years ago as an “effort to relate all the arts.”

Portrait photographs of Provincetown artists by Ron Amato hung on the walls surrounding the crowd. They appeared to be waiting to hear the discussion.

Artist Cid Bolduc, co-chair of Forum 24 along with Grace Hopkins, introduced Provincetown artist and gallerist Mike Carroll. Bolduc had asked Carroll to put together the “What is an artist?” panel for Forum 24. The original Forum 49 panel on the same question featured George Biddle, who ran artist projects for the WPA; painters Hans Hofmann and Adolph Gottlieb; and architect Serge Chermayeff. There were controversies about abstract art versus traditional painting. Proponents of abstraction, such as Hofmann, demanded new aesthetic forms in the wake of World War II in a “desperate attempt to escape from evil,” as Gottlieb put it.

The question, Carroll said, was one he’d begun to think about too much ever since Bolduc invited him to organize the panel. For that task, he said, he had asked himself, “Who’s lighting up the horizon?”

Leah Triplett Harrington was the first person who came to mind, he said. She is the director of exhibitions and contemporary curatorial initiatives at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Carroll also tapped painter and printmaker Fred H.C. Liang, chair of the printmaking department at Mass. College of Art and Design; painter and writer Mira Schor, who is known for her representations of texts and language and her questioning of representation of the body, as well as her knowledge of feminist art history; and contemporary arts writer and curator Helen Molesworth to be on the panel.

Schor opened the discussion by recounting a memory of a conversation in which she told a friend bluntly: “I do not think you are an artist.”

The friend was talented, Schor said, and knitted beautiful coats of her own design. “Everything was beautiful, but it remained outside of a sphere that I was fighting to be considered in,” said Schor. “I was in the middle of a lifetime fight to be an artist in relation to art history and to challenge definitions of what art was.”

Schor read from Hans Hofmann’s Forum 49 speech: “Traditions must be kept alive, traditions must not end in self-contentment. All that is alive is through constant struggle and fight.”

Schor was born in 1950 and grew up in New York; her parents were artists, and conversations about art happened regularly in her house, she said.

Carroll asked whether an artist must exist in an ecosystem.

That question didn’t get an answer. Instead, Triplett Harrington said that an artist is someone who is truly invested in the life of the mind. “An artist is not someone who is putting something out there and walking away,” she said, “but someone who wants to externalize what they’re thinking in an expressive way.”

She raised a worry: are artists not as free to be artists as they once were? The predecessors of the evening’s gathering, midcentury artists and architects, were immigrants starting over amid geopolitical turmoil: “World building as an act of survival.”

Carroll asked whether there is a moment of decision for anyone becoming an artist. “And what is it that needs to be invested or given up” in making that decision?

“Commitment and proficiency,” said Triplett Harrington.

Becoming an artist, Liang said, is nothing like becoming a doctor: “A single definition of what an artist is is hard to nail down.”

Molesworth took the mic: “How did I get to be 58 years old and not know what an artist is?” she asked. “You can say that artists are particularly concerned with how perception and language conjoin or align to form something we might call knowledge or truth. The ‘how’ of this — what tools we use, value for labor, changes over time and across different cultures.”

And one other thing, said Molesworth: “Artists defy or trouble what is typically described as useful.” Part of art’s deepest pleasure is in fact its uselessness, she said.

“Parenthetically,” she added, “this is why artists are anxious, as this can be an existential dilemma leading to therapy and panel discussions.”

There are other burdens that come with the commitment to being an artist: The artist decides she is an artist, and only she can decide what that means. “No one can validate the existence of artists except the artists themselves,” said Molesworth. “There’s no Hippocratic Oath for artists. There’s no peer review. Artists must generate their own rules. They’re also the only folks who get to say no and wear whatever they want to the gala.”

“I’m kind of torn,” said Schor, still pondering her declaration that her friend wasn’t an artist. “I was discounting the effect of beauty. But she didn’t participate in the work fully. The commitment it takes, the step between making something beautiful and living through the tough times, the investment of being an artist in the world.”

Schor said in Provincetown you can only import artists in little residencies now, a little package. “You get young artists who are much better businessmen and more ambitious.”

Carroll said there was a moment when Provincetown became a much less separate place. “I feel sad for that loss and for a place to develop its own eccentricities so they can flourish,” he said.

A guest in the audience raised his hand. He wanted to know what sets an artist apart. “An artist is on one side of the boundary and everything else is on the other side of the boundary,” he said. “Well, where is that boundary?”

Liang said artists know where the boundary is and are the same people who are drawn to it and to challenging it.

Another raised hand: “I’m reading Adam Moss’s The Work of Art, and again and again he says it’s about persistence, that it’s an insane persistence drawn from all directions.”

It’s about a commitment, Molesworth said, but “it’s not ‘living your best life.’ You commit to an idea.”

Provincetown artist Mark Adams spoke from the audience: it seems like what’s being discussed is a status question, he said. He wanted the question to be, “How do you make an experience of art, or how do you have an art experience?”

“We all know when we see something transformative that stops us in our tracks,” said Triplett Harrington.

“We each know the answer,” said Molesworth, “the ineffable, the articulateness around the unknowable. Every artist who makes something is making something out of a profoundly long tradition that they have no choice but to be engaged in. That’s where the boundary is. Are you or are you not doing the great work of pulling history over to where you are?”