Well, if you're going to be doing photography for artistic purposes, you need an SLR. That is a kind of camera that when you look into, you look out the lens instead of a little window like most other cameras. Disposable cameras are the best example of a non-SLR camera because you just look through a piece of plastic instead of the lens. You're going to want to choose either film or digital, yourself. Depending on what you want to do with it. With film, you actually have more control over how the picture turns out, but if you use a digital SLR, you can use Photoshop or other tools to touch up your pictures. If you choose film, you need to choose if you want black and white or color film. Now, there's a few choices, but there is not clearly a superior one to the others. It's just preference. I would rather use a digital SLR because I wouldn't have to constantly buy film and I'm pretty good with Photoshop, but after that, I would choose black and white over colored film.
Depending on which you choose, there's hundreds of cameras out there, but I've always used a Pentax K-1000 for film.
Remember that there is actually quite a lot of stuff involved in taking photographs. It's not just snapping a picture. There's a lot of settings to adjust before you take a picture. Cameras are no where near close enough to know how to auto-adjust and auto-focus better than humans do, even though most companies will try to tell you otherwise.
Hope that helps some.