It’s a kind of defeatism both in artists and collectors/patrons that I just do not see as being the reality of the situation. I think there are possibly hundreds or thousands of visual artists alive right now who can be at the top of their field/medium given sufficient patronage. I have no idea who most of them are, but I believe they must be out there and can be found 😂
Discussion
But I do think specifically with athletes and musicians there are much better support systems in place for scouting talent and rewarding them early. Once they have a big enough stage they can usually make a living because their audience scales up. But for visual artists that are working in physical mediums, it probably takes a small number of extremely devoted patrons to provide that same level of support, because the objects of art don’t really scale in digital formats. What makes a visual artist great seems to be lost in translation digitally compared to music or athletic performance. Or the audience is not really there that would appreciate it at a large enough scale.