[Pitchwife]

D'accord about Celebrimbor, I don't think he would have gone along with Sauron's plans so far if he had known who or what he was dealing with. But his ambition as a craftsman made him vulnerable to Annatar's promises of improved methods and techniques to fashion artefacts of greater power.

Melkor certainly belongs here as the archetype of the inventor and subcreator gone wrong. (And may I confess that I always had a soft spot for his attempt to turn the Music into free jazz; the desire "to make things of their own that should be new and unthought of by others" is hardly reprehensible by itself in my eyes - isn't that what drives every artist?)

Eöl, hm, I don't know that he really belongs here, and Maeglin neither, as the evil they committed wasn't tied to their craft. They were just artisans who also happened to be evil. While Eöl was possessive as hell and this vice drove him to commit the deeds which led to his and Aredhel's death it wasn't the love of the works of his own hands William Cloud Hicklin mentioned above that did this.

Zigûr, nice observation about the Dwarves! I wonder whether they are largely free of the lust for domination because Aulë made them so, or whether Eru improved a little on Aulë's design when he gave them life.

I'm not so sure about "Knowledge. Rule. Order" - that seems more like a scientist's dream than an artist's to me. "Creative chaos" is a trope for a reason.

One temptation to makers that I see in Fëanor is idolizing the made thing, the artifact, and holding it higher than the art of making itself. He tells the Valar he would never be able to make the likes of the Silmaril again, but he could have moved on to make other interesting things if he hadn't been so obsessed with the Shiners Three. It's said that every artist puts a part of themself into their work, and in Fëanor's case this part was pretty big. (Sauron, of course, is the most extreme example for this, exaggerating the concept almost into parody.)