>>149034570
Not to mention the more important part, the focus and end-result of his art, that being self-validation. Almost all of his artwork that he does in his spare time are sculptures and self-portraits, very well done ones, but obviously done for the sake of vanity. He plays the clarinet often, but not for the sake of entertaining others but for his own enjoyment as seen by how he will brazenly scream at his moronic neighbors to pipe down while he's practicing but then loudly play so hard his squeaking can be heard across the whole neighborhood. And the few times he's ever tried to be an artist in a business sense or in teaching, he's only ever shown interest in imposing his vision upon the production, never what his clients or students came for.

Squidward's got talent, he's clearly a renaissance man when it comes to devoting time to expressing himself through painting or song or dance or what have you, it's just that almost all of the effort is to express the idea of "I'm a genius, look at me, praise me for my talents". He's got the sort of vanity and self-importance that if you commissioned him to draw a still-life of Jellyfish Fields at sunset, he'd end up drawing a rock formation shaped exactly like his head partially blocking the sun, and then get upset if you tell him to redo it and claim you "don't understand art".