To remain an artist in modern culture requires stubborn defiance of education. Great artists create by ignoring or going against expert advice and conventional training.
Someone asked Stanley Kubrick if it was normal for a director to spend so much care on lighting each shot. He said, "I don't know. I've never seen anyone else light a film."
You have to be stubborn to remain an artist in modern culture. Playing the role of "artist" is easy, but actually creating means going against education.
Maybe artists are people who couldn't conform to teachers' demands. Pavlov found dogs he couldn't brainwash until he'd castrated them and starved them for three weeks. If teachers could do that to us, they could achieve Plato's dream of a republic with no artists left at all.
We see the artist as wild and aberrant. But perhaps artists are simply those constitutionally unable to accept what they were taught.
Once we believe art is self-expression, individuals can be criticized not just for lack of skill, but simply for being who they are. That's when education becomes destructive to creativity.
This connects to what we learned about education is not a substance, education or training, and art is like hair.