[egypturnash]

It's a nice gig if you can get it, but competition for the gallery scene is pretty fierce. Plus a lot of the required skillset is "convincing assholes with way too much money that this ugly thing you caused to exist is worth a lot".

NFTs have somewhat democratized this, by providing a new avenue for assholes with too much crypto to pay absurd prices for art, with the bonus wrinkle of "artist gets a cut if someone uses their piece to launder ill-gotten gains" though there's already marketplaces that ignore that part of the smart contracts designed to make that happen. And a different sort of deliberate ugliness.