ideas outlive forms, artists outlive themselves?

This is a strange line that jumped out to me in the course of some reading last night. I think it particularly resonates with a conversation I had immediately upon my return to Santa Fe: I was talking with a talented art student studying at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He was telling me that he thought artists are the people whose ideas stay around posthumously and retain significance. He considers Einstein to be an artist. He said that anyone can draw and make things, but few people are remembered by their cultures for their ideas, for their contributions to culture and its understanding of itself.

So then I asked him, "well, what do you call yourself if you are studying art?" He replied that he was studying other things as well, and that he said he would probably die and be forgotten.

The notion of ideas outliving "the death of the forms in which they are represented" seems to have curious implications for art and culture.