MUSICIANS:

I am an artist who does not create art.

This is not my phrase, just a very good description of my life to date.
In fact, I may be worse than an artist: I am a musician.

Artists struggle to create something outside of themselves. But art is easier to recognize than music. Some pieces of art are derided as being "too abstract" or "too modern". But we can understand that colours on canvas, pencil on paper, metal or stone carved to shape, are kinds of art. We may think they're worthless, but we understand that they are art.

Music is not the same. Music that is not recognized as music is just noise. We struggle too, to create something outside of ourselves, and 99% of us will never succeed. Even a child can create art; it takes a gifted hand to create music. I have been a musician for fourteen years, and all I have to show of my own work is an eight-bar chord progression. Nothing else. Music is so hard to come by that we are forced to replicate the works of grand masters when our own efforts to create fail.
And though the music of our grand masters is indeed formidable, it is not our own. We cannot even make it our own when we play it: our interpretation is not judged by its own merits--it is determined to be successful or unsucessful depending on how faithful we were to the composer's intentions, on how well we emulated their style. Horowitz, Zimerman, Rubenstein, Yundi...everyone has their favourite, and their favourite is inevitably the performer they believe has most closely presented the piece "the way it was meant to be played".

Painters do not spend their lives reproducing Mona Lisas and water lilies, and being praised for their adherence to the original. They strike out on their own, experimenting, showing the world what they see. But our lives are much worse as musicians, because we overwhelmingly cannot show the world what we hear.