The differentiated artist

   This morning, the local television news was reporting about a small group of people, mostly artists, that were being forced to vacate a warehouse live/work space in nearby Oakland because the building had been condemned as unsafe. The reporter interviewed a few of the tenants, and one spoke, a young woman with spiked hair and dressed in a red blazer, of how most of the people being forced to leave were "small business owners, artists and creative people".
   What she said got me thinking about the idea of being an artist, what it means to different people, and why it seemed that, for her at least, referring to these people as such set these occupants' evictions apart from other people that might face similar circumstances. It got me thinking about my own very conflated feelings about what 'being an artist' may mean culturally, and reminded me of why so many artists' views of themselves illicited a strong negative reaction within me.
   The question for me is why should anyone be treated or thought of as different than other people, and why the role of the artist should be considered as important or vital? In my own experience, I have found that most of the people that I've met or come into contact with that think of themselves as artists are socially important mainly to those that think of themselves similarly; they reinforce eachothers' ideas of self and place.
   I ask the reader to please be careful to note that when I use the term artist, I do so to differentiate the person who thinks of themself as such from the person that merely makes or does things in a creative manner. I make this distinction because I do in fact believe that it is important to have people (at least in my own life and with whatever word one chooses to call them) that seek to explore different ways to think about the material world.
   So it is then a matter for me of not what a person does, but how one defines themselves, and if these distinctions serve to differentiate themselves, or things from the ideas that serve to contain and limit them. For much in the same way that language labels and helps us to make distinctions, it also imprisons us in notions of how things should be.
   For me, freedom lies fundamentally in evicting predetermined ideas from my own limited ideas and sensations, not reinforcing them with a name