Thanks to a growing tolerance for NyQuil, I am fighting a holding action with my head cold, yet am still unable to sleep. This has led to some middle of the night puttering around and then random surfing.

Random surfing, of course, leads to random thoughts.

What is up with everyone and their grandmother calling themselves an artist? Once upon a time, the term was barely even complementary, and artists as a whole were tolerated because of the contribution they were able to make to society and culture at large, but were considered, personally and individually, to be not the sort of folks one wanted to associate with.

Word associative stigmas have a habit of fading in this day and age, but do we have to use the word artist to refer to everyone who produces *any* sort of content? Writers, musicians, programmers, and who knows who else are suddenly being lumped under the banner of artist. Of course, some of them are.

Most, on the other hand, are tradesmen. Or crafters. People of skill who create things. Well and good. But artist used to mean something more. It meant that you put something of yourself into what you made. That it was something more than just a product or commodity or (god help me) intellectual property. It was, well, art. I don’t see a lot of art being produced these days. Certainly not by the people everyone keeps telling me are “artists”.

Second thought - content producers and artists alike have something in common. (Actually they have almost everything in common, but moving on from that…) What we make our livings from is far more jealously guarded than what we create for ourselves. What we produce to sell is hoarded, rarely put on the web; and when it is, it’s ringed with as many notices of ownership and copyright as one is able to muster. What we produce for ourselves (or, what no one is willing to pay us to produce/create but which we create anyway) is given like a gift; sometimes with no strings at all, sometimes with a token request. Feedback, linkbacks, a small monetary donation - you get the picture.

We (artists) need to have both kinds of artwork in order to survive. Too much work done “purely for love” and one will starve. Too much “I’m getting paid to do this” stuff and all the joy goes out of what you do. In spite of this, I do sometimes wish that everything I create could be of the “purely for love, give it like a gift” sort.