identity

It indicates an awareness by the questioner that they also have gone through or are going through a process to categorize themselves.

As the role of the artists becomes more and more professionalized, the specifics of ones academic training seems to play a more central role in defining ones practice.

There is always a demand to locate one's practice as a triangulation or interpolation between the known.

Asked in this way, the question suggests that one is born an artist and then has to come out. Being an artist is just like being gay (at least by some accounts).