One of a Kind (two of them)

Yesterday evening my wife and I went to the annual summer craft fair in Jerusalem. It is held in the Sultan's Pool, an ancient reservoir in the valley beneath the Turkish walls of the Old City, a setting of the kind not too many cities can offer. I'm very familiar with the place. When I had two active dogs, I used to bring them down there frequently, because they could run about freely without being hit by cars. Now I have only one, elderly dog, who's too arthritic for long walks, so I don't walk about the Sultan's Pool anymore.
As familiar with the place as I am, I found it hard to orient myself, because it was dark, and because of the booths that had been put up all over the place, and because it was packed with people.
The fair always attracts thousands of visitors, because in addition to booths selling crafts from all over the world (Korea, Uzbekistan, Morocco, India - you name it), the work of Israeli craftspeople, and a nice selection of fast foods, there are performances every night by major local pop stars.
After sharing some food - a spicy chorizo wrapped in dough, and a container of Chinese style chicken and mushrooms on white rice - we looked for the Israeli crafts booths. We went the wrong way first and walked past all the international displays, which were generally attractive, but there was nothing new for us there. Three Andean musicians (I don't know whether they were from Peru or Ecuador) were performing on a stage as roamed about - the full tones of pan pipes. The Israeli crafts turned out to be on the far side of the food court, so we had to shove our way through the gathering crowd. First there were some displays by store owners from the Old City, Palestinian merchants selling the kind of thing you can buy there: Hebron glass, embroidery and jewelry, brass trays. Then we finally got to the booths displaying things that the people selling them had actually made by themslves. Most of it had no appeal at all for us, but there were four or five ceramicists whose work was on a high level. If our house weren't entirely flooded with my own work, we would have been tempted to buy.
I was interested in comparing my workmanship to that of professionals (I have a long way to go), in getting ideas, and also in imagining what it would be like to be a professional potter. If you can afford it, it's probably better to be an amateur (the same goes for music, photography, and writing). One tall, slightly aloof man had a large stock of well-made, useful objects, ranging in size from small custard dishes to imposing bowls and tall pitchers and vases. But how interesting could it be for him to make a hundred mugs, all more or less the same? To make a living at pottery, even if you're bohemian and settle for a low income, you need to take in a couple of thousand dollars a month. That's a lot of mugs!
I can see trying that, for the discipline, to demonstrate and develop control - but I'd much rather produce unique things, like the two clumsy animal forms I've posted here. They're meant to look as if they'd been dug up from some chalcolithic site, Canaanite pagan cult objects. I've made three more of them, but I haven't fired them yet. I don't have to sell them or to try to make the kind of things people will buy. I'm free to have fun with forms that appeal to me.
Yes, I aspire to acquire more skill and improve my work (in pottery as in music), and I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't think I was improving, but I have to careful to trim my aspirations so that my creative work will serve me, and not the opposite.
I don't mean to sound egotistical here. There's a difference between serving oneself by buying expensive things for oneself or indulging oneself in other ways, and serving oneself by meditating, hiking, playing music with friends, or engaging in a craft or art.