For some people telling them you're an artist seems to mean something like you're spending all your income on lottery tickets.

    Personally, I think good mediocre artists are often better in many ways than lots of great ones. Shakespeare isn't really very funny--one tries to find it funny--and his early stuff was tortured and gross, striving for effect. Cezanne is clumsy beyond all reason. Gogol can't even begin to describe a young woman, as if he's blinded by headlights. Michelangelo's women look like he hated to stick breasts on those awesome dudes, and hoped they'd fall off later (and bounce). Mattisse is pretty much the only convincing fake-outsider probably because he sneaks in a real folk-art weird clunkyness disguised as a put-on folk-art weird clunkyness. Clever ploy. A lot of great art utterly sucks in the things it isn't focused on, the stuff it has to skip to get to somewhere else.

Nabokov used the Russian word poshlost to refer to a sense of the fartsy. I think some of the stink of ego in poor art isn't even real ego, it's just that people can't give themselves permission to make art, but feel they have to put something "important" and "serious" in it. So the ego-junk is thrown in to justify doing it at all, as an excuse, a note from mom. I once saw a local artist try to explain his paintings of a tree in fall, winter, summer, and spring, in terms of chaos theory and strange attractors and so on. "My mom says I can paint a tree this way, because of the new physics." People can't possibly really be as gassy as all that, they'd explode.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but art involves more eyes than one's own. It's the sharing of experience, with the sensibility of the artist, with others, it's sitting around the fire and hanging out together that makes it good. It's camping.