Artists and Technicians

*DISCLAIMER: This post is not intended to offend or piss off or make fun of, but merely to point out some inconsistencies in logic. Also, while I use the terms artist and technician as a dichotomous comparison, I don't mean it in any way as a commentary on technical skill - that's not actually being discussed. This is more about personal goals from involvement in respective creative fields.*

It seems that everyone wants to be an artist these days. Whether your medium is photography, dance, shrubberies, or sandwiches (seriously, the high schoolers that work at Subway are aaaaaaartists), your goal is to be An Artist and to embody that completely in all the things you do.

I have a couple issues with this. First, where is your threshold for defining yourself as an artist? Who decides what that is? An Artist is a binary term: you are either artist or not artist. So someone who is immune to their own scrutiny (or anyone else's) can make dolls out of dried-out orange peels, call it steampunk, post them on Etsy, and consider themselves in company with Vincent Van Gogh and John Lennon. That's...weird.

Second, where does that leave the technicians? There are people in the creative world who are fantastic at executing the work of others faithfully and to perfection. I'll use dance as an example. Most dancers perform the choreography of others rather than generating their own. Your average (non-principal, I guess, although that's up for discussion as well) ballerina in the Kirov, your average American Tribal Style bellydancer, your average Chinese dancer are tasked with faithfully executing the movements with very little of their own interpretation thrown in. To force or ask these technicians to be Artists would be both entirely too much pressure and a slight to the things they actually do well.

So my point is this: we can't ALL be artists, for the same reason that we can't all arbitrarily decide that we're rocket scientists, marine biologists, and physicists. In a field without a formal vetting process and no real qualifications to speak of, the lack of definition in naming convention can destroy the field (e.g., I can't hear the term now without rolling my eyes and retching a little bit and instead prefer to use the word to describe myself when I take a magnificent poo). The implication that we could and should all be artists is an insult to the skills of actual artists, technicians, practitioners, hobbyists, and the rest of the people that make the creative world go 'round.