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There is a huge difference between "all great artists did X" and "there is nothing particularly in common between all great artists". My intuition is telling me that the truth is definitely in the middle, and if there was some way to perform a "clustering" algorithm on artist's lives/work/legacy/commercial success we would see some clear patterns emerge around certain "archetypes" or "personas" of artists, and this guy doesn't seem to fit into one.

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It is natural for one’s intuition to be in the middle of one’s perception of two extremes. :)

Fair enough, you're right that there would surely be patterns. But there's no advance reason to think these would line up with popular stereotypes. PCA & factor analysis often come up with highly unintuitive components! And unless the fit was spectacular, there'd be many 'great artists' falling outside of its net, so we'd just be falling back to judging the work, not the person's life.

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