For all the fun-filled entertainment, sport and spectacle in it, there’s a menacing undercurrent of meanness and injustice to the way celebrity artists are treated lately.

The legal escapades of the blonde trio of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton have lately dominated not just the gossip rags of old, but the mainstream news pages of big dailies and timely slots on evening national news telecasts.

What is mostly overlooked in the wall-wall-coverage is that these women are artists. Legitimate criticism of their work and the relationship between its quality and the remuneration they receive has a place in the media no doubt. In the generation before these three, Madonna and Michael Jackson came in for severe criticism of their work as well and in particular for the pay and level of celebrity status they garnered from it. By today, however, few knock those two artists for their proven long-term ability to read the market for pop music and produce work in response to it that succeeded by any measure. In a different century, Amadeus Mozart, maybe the most celebrated music artist in Western history, was also a misbehaving celebrity who was at once widely celebrated and roundly derided by critics, even while he proved he was better than anyone at reading the market and submitting to it very successful work.

Lohan is no Mozart, except for the multitude of similarities between them. Unlike the accountants, pipe-fitters and real estate developers who populate society, artists are required to go down inside themselves to trace out Braille-like the sources of emotions both new and familiar. They are workers of a different kind: when you sign up to be an artist, you have signed up for inner turmoil, disturbing insight, personal and interpersonal conflict, emotional pain and repeated public displays of abject failure.

There is no punch-clock for the artist: from the time usually in your teens or younger to when you finally either give it up or die, you are consigned to being an artist even in your sleep. There may be mentors and guides along the way, but their advice is usually some form of “you’re on your own.” No work is more personally testing, and at the same time, no work is more personal. Art that is not the product somewhere along the torturous path of its creation a profoundly introspective, desperately alone, and exceedingly open act is never going to be good, certainly not for the artist, and usually not for the audience either, who demand nothing less.

For accountants, pipe-fitters and property developers, it is really all about the money, and winning a lottery or socking away retirement savings from a life of work are indistinguishable results. For the vast majority of us non-artists, it may be inconceivable that there is something other than money to develop a serious commitment about. So we apply our calculations of success versus income to the lives of the celebrity artists and find the equation in many cases out of whack.

Perhaps only desperate poverty should be the remuneration for even the very best artists. Those greats of the past who died penniless are all the more celebrated posthumously for being even more “real,” more “legitimate” than their contemporaries who amassed wealth enough to live the average life, or god forbid, enough to live a life with pleasures small and great.

But what few other workers deal with is the pressure to always do something new and different. The accountant, the pipe-fitter and the developer succeed in material fortune the more they perfect the movements of their craft and repeat their actions with greater ease of repetition. It is the opposite for the artist: repeat yourself and you’re dead.

Workers of all kinds deal with inspectors, supervisors and customers who question the quality of their work. It’s a limited audience. For artists, there is a line-up of inspectors and rooms full of supervisors all gauging one’s work not from any standard manuals but from widely varied tastes and personal experiences, and unlike inspectors and supervisors for other workers, there is no code of conduct guiding how an artist’s self-appointed critics must behave.

Britney Spears may not sing very well. The equivalent would be a 20-something apprentice pipe-fitter whose layout is a bit wonky and whose joints have to be done over again sometimes. But the young pipe-fitter doesn’t have thousands of millions of critics lining up to pronounce throughout the mass media just how badly he sucks at his work. And because pipe-fitting is finished at 5 PM, he doesn’t have those critics looking into his life at home, at the bar, or with his girlfriend, sniffing out more damaging behaviors to jump all over. And even if he did, how he lives his life away from his tools doesn’t say anything about how he wields his tools on the job.

The artist’s life is part and parcel of their art, and how they behave at every moment does impinge on their work as an artist. And even if the artist did it only for the money, to be told repeatedly and to have it trumpeted daily in the mass media that you suck is unbearable pressure no matter who you are or how much money you make. It’s grossly unfair, because no accountant or pipe-fitter, and certainly no real estate developer, puts anywhere near the kind of pressure on themselves that artists already start out with.

The blonde trio of Spears, Lohan and Hilton are only today’s targets, and more will come tomorrow. But they are the superstars for better or worse of the pop art world. For every one of these celebrities who drinks too much in a vain attempt to relieve the outward and inward pressure, there are hundreds of thousands of lesser-recognized artists living with the same inward pressures who are privately stabbed themselves, out of sight in their rooms, with each public flogging administered to the stars to the great laughter, entertainment and sport of the masses of other workers whose only contact with art and the immense difficulties in producing it is limited to the brevity of turning the page in the newspaper at coffee break and barely hearing the background music in the office.

Both the great and the lesser artists are artists all the same, and all of them, from the busker at the liquor store to Paris Hilton at the Hollywood club deserve nothing more nor less than fair, kind, and thoughtful criticism. No one deserves the brutality we subject these celebrity artists to, no matter how poor one may judge their creations. The bullies in the media who hammer their exposed souls with such meanness should be called out for it. Besides being young and obviously fragile women in these three cases, they are also artists. So back off, especially all you jerks who haven’t even tried to create beauty and do nothing but smirk at those who do and deride those who fail.