Empathy towards your users is really important to create the best products. The only problem I perceive in thinking of oneself as an artist rather than just a product designer is perhaps because of the slight notion of ego attached to the statement, “I create art!”

This enables an artist to claim to know what is better for the users, because what the artist creates is ‘real’ art. And this then starts to be contrary to having empathy for the users.

Being intuitive allows one to jump to global minima, rather than getting bogged down in a local minima and that is a good thing. But intuition allows one only to make the jumps, and finally the data needs to validate the intuition. Without validation by real data, what we create is just art and not necessarily good design.