Comment by vidarh
6 days ago
After a few of those failures, it stopped being rational to think he'd make money from his art, yet he persisted with his art.
Your argument is entirely backwards.
Artists who dedicate a lot of their time to art sometimes want to sell for whatever reason, sometimes commercial, often ego, but also a lot of the time are forced to spend some of their time trying to sell because they want to eat and would rather not take another job.
That doesn't mean making money was their primary or even a motivation for their art, but a reflection that money is a necessity to survive, and that if you make the art anyway there's often very little reason not to at least try to sell it.
It is not rational to assume that this mean that if the odds of finding a buyer becomes even much smaller that it will cause fewer people to make art, or even try to sell it, given that the choice to continue making art to sell it is already an emotional, irrational choice already.
Right... and if they can't sell their art... then what do they do?
They have to get a job that feeds them... which means they spend less time developing their art...
Ergo there is less art and the art that does exist is less well-developed.
I made no claim that artists' "primary motivation" is financial.
You're making the unsubstantiated assumption that the job will replace the time spent on their art rather than replace the time spent trying to sell their art.
Since most peoples art sell extremely poorly, it's entirely plausible for most artists to replace their income by replacing their sales effort with another job.
For a tiny sliver of the highest paid artists, it might have an effect. In a lot of markets this is already addressed by public funding and patronage because even for many of they highest paid it is hard to make a living from sales.
And now we're back to other commenters' argument. You can substantiate it by sharing some examples of master-tier artists -- people who really pushed the craft -- who did so without any financial component to their work.