Success Quote by Bill Budge

There is a small trap hidden in the word “calling”: it’s not about making art, it’s about declaring an identity. Budge’s line frames “artist” as a title you don’t pin on yourself without risking self-mythology, pretension, or the suspicion that you’re auditioning for admiration rather than doing the work. The misgiving isn’t insecurity in the pop-psych sense; it’s a recognition that “artist” is a social label, granted (or withheld) by others, and that self-bestowal can feel like jumping the queue.

Coming from a businessman, the remark carries an extra edge. In commerce, you’re rewarded for branding yourself clearly: founder, CEO, innovator. In art, self-branding can read as a sales pitch, and Budge is implicitly skeptical of that impulse. The best artists, he suggests, are too aware of the gap between intention and outcome to claim the badge cleanly. They know how much of the process is failure, revision, theft-from-influences, luck. “Artist” sounds like a finished state; making art is anything but.

The intent is almost managerial: a caution against the résumé version of creativity. The subtext is that seriousness often shows up as restraint. If you have to announce you’re an artist, you might be protecting yourself from the harder test: whether the work stands up without the title doing the heavy lifting.