I believe individual reasons behind the artist-musician/musician-artist phenomenon must vary from case to case and time to time. Although there must have been when the general trends and economics environment gave a huge push on the movement. I still think that no matter what factors were accountable for the movement, the results were fruitful because as people always say, the most innovative and creative piece is always made when connection is made between the two fields.

This said, I also understand why some people insist that people from different profession should do what they are the best at. In economics, there is this concept called specialization. The definition of specialization is “the process of concentrating on and becoming expert in a particular subject or skill.” This is largely promoted in business models because the profit is maximized. However, I think what depreciates the value of specialization in art industry is that the demand and supply work totally different from generic industry. What’s more, there’s more fluidity between different areas as well. As an example that’s been raised in the article, terms from music were coined to represent paintings as well. If we take a step backwards and study the relationship between sounds and visions, we also cannot separate the two completely, one of the supportive example being noise and performing art. There has been a lot of technological creations linking sounds and visions as well. One of the examples can be found here: Latest Invention That Can “See” Sounds. Last but not the least, I want to coincide with the author on how the artist-musician/musician-artist movement shows that art advocates freedom, more than most of the industries. This is because, art is highly subjective, meaning the line between right and wrong/good and bad in art is very much blurred by personal opinions.

There’s a lot of creativity involved and creativity’s easily depleted if we don’t extend the boundary. This is why not having the same people doing the same thing/open to outsiders may not be the worst for the industry, despite the need for virtuosos. Art forms need revolutions. I wouldn’t be surprised if an artist go viral for visualizing a piece of music or performing a painting perfectly, given it is already happening with live coding.

However, I think it requires a lot of effort and talent for anyone to be proficient in both fields and to be able to combine the two.  For me personally, I study music as minor and it would be hard just to imagine myself transitioning from music to fine art.