Subject says it all. Currently you can only sort by artists, which again does not apply the “ignore article” setting.
This is actually normal, this is a sort on the display artist not the artist, there’s no sort name or ignore article applicable here sorry.
I’ll rename the sort so that it’s more clear. (And no I can’t / won’t add the sort name artists as you can have 10 artists for an album)
What’s the difference between artist and display artist? Is the latter the album artist?
And if sorted by artist, where will an album with ten different artists be sorted?
Album sort is Display artist too. It’s the value returned by the provider, can be one artist, can be multiple artists separated by , can be something completely different than the artist if you mess with their db.
OK, I will try to find out what Kodi delivers there as sortartist. But it seems Kodi also does not apply the “ignore artivles” setting here, as e.g. “The Beatles” have a display name including the “The”.
Would it be possible to add album artist as a sort field for smart album playlists?
As written it’s already there, it’s the sort by artist. As said I’ll relabel it for clarity
Ah, I did not get that from your reply and also got confused because the Kodi API seems to know both “displayartist” and “albumartist”.
So if I have a list of artists and sort by displayartist, “ignore articles” can be applied, because I have only one artist per entry. But in a list of albums that does not work because every track might have a different displayartist?
There’s no display artist for artists 
it’s called a name You are mixing artists data and album / songs data
Really, 20 emoticons is not enough, I have to write a proper sentence?