I passionately hate this idea and would never, ever use it, for all of the objections raised above. I am never not being "artistic" when I'm making my games, but I'm also rarely not considering the commercial feasibility of the project.
I absolutely understand where you're coming from as a consumer, I get the spirit of what you're asking and I don't think it's stupid, it's just that as a creator I would firmly object to having to classify my projects one way or the other.
Again, there is no "choosing". You can choose both if you really think they apply. And again, maybe "artistic" isn't the right word for how it's used right now, but if you're making a game that you want to be commercially viable you probably aren't making Mu Cartographer or Strawberry Cubes or Slap Game. It's not "Oh all these commercial games are so soulless and unartistic" but the goal of making a commercial game is in line with the status quo of how people expect to be entertained and get enjoyment, while the games that, by more traditional definitions, are being made "for the art of it" are generally so far removed from that goal, and these two things are absolutely choking each other out.
What would be the alternative? Just make a "commercial games" category and everything else is just everything else? What word would you use to describe "games that are trying to experiment with the medium, not entertain you"?
If you can choose both, and assuming these aren't tags but a separate system, then that kind of incentivizes everybody to choose both to increase the number of search results their game turns up in, but itch's culture isn't quite that mercenary, so let's just set that aside.
Choosing both definitely makes it less objectionable, but it also seems like it would make it less useful. I just don't foresee a system like that pruning too many results unless you search for games that exclusively use one tag.
I don't imagine that tagging with both would help? Like by that standard you might as well tag your game with every genre too, or at least the popular ones. The thing is if you put yourself in the "artistic" side of things, people expect something from it, and you're theoretically "competing" with everyone else in that tag. Less of a concern for most artistic games than for commercial games. Meanwhile, good luck getting anything from tagging your artistic game as commercial. People will judge it on criteria it isn't aiming for, and at best you'll get a couple of purchases maybe? And then maybe refunds?
There are games that do both, and some successfully so. But they know what they are, they know what they're trying to do. They're not Slap Game trying to sell itself.
