You have my enthusiastic agreement with your thoughts about the fairness as to who is an "artist".

A strong admiration, respect and honor accompanies that word "artist" and the vagueness of the definition of what an artist is frustrates me. Can I give my respect and admiration to someone without a clear idea of what and who I am admiring, what traits, skills and commitment that I am looking up to?

Most of the people I know of who are supposed to be "artists" didn't show the commitment to it anymore than the straw man "Roland". And the phrase "an artist must suffer" was usually an undeserved plea for admiration or a demand for sympathy.

So I tend to reject the word "artist" as undefinable and hence unusable and the phrase "an artist must suffer" as a statement of conceit.

My definition, when I use the word artist runs something like this:

"Artist: someone who is skillful at his work, more committed than most, enjoys doing the work and takes pride in the finished job. It also needs to be done better than I could do, given the time and effort to learn to how to do it well."