I upvoted your gratitude comment, I’m not a huge commenter but I’ve done similar. There’s so much decisiveness and bickering from miscommunication and misunderstanding that it’s nice seeing when people support each other through it.

It’s a refernce to Chris Farley’s movie Tommy Boy.

That’s also fair. I’m just making up definitions, you can form your own opinions.

I wouldn’t agree with the above comments assessment either. I don’t know enough about Picasso to say which bucket I’d put him in (also the world is grey, he might be in both buckets). To me it’s more about the motivation for creating the art, was it strictly profit motive (performer) or did he make it for pretty much any other reason (artist)? An artist can make a painting just because they themselves think it looks nice or because they want to share it with others.

I’m a big proponent of drawing inspiration from others and building upon it. I doubt whoever Picasso pulled the art style from was the first person to put paint onto a canvas.

Another perspective for you to consider coming from someone who works in product development in a completely different field. I don’t have good skill in visual arts (I play a couple instruments though) but I personally consider good product design/engineering as a sort of art like thing. To me the distinction comes down to motive and passion. I recently saw someone contrast artists from performers where an artist is self motivated to create their art wheras a performer primarily seeks an audience adapting their “product” to maximize profit. A designer that’s focused on making a product to solve people’s problems is a good thing. People that make products solely for the purpose of extracting the most money out of customers are the problem. In my experience most people who have to work for a level living try to do good, even in demeaning clock punching type jobs.

I think that headline has cause and effect backwards. Running out of diesel is what’s causing prices to surge. Hormuz supply has stopped, global oil reserves are being depleted. The supply has been reduced so price will continue to increase until enough of the market can no longer afford to purchase before it hits an equilibrium again. This doesn’t even account for companies taking advantage of the situation and choosing to increase price to capture additional profit.