As someone teaching at an art school/university I can assure you that unhealthy drives for art often (but not nearly always!) have hard psychological causes. That brings all kins of hardships with itself, many of those artists live unhealthy, often impoverished, rarely stable lives. And while the romatic view of the impoverished artist is a popular one, these people are rarely as free as they like they would be and I have seen suicides happen.
Most artists I know would love to have stability, yet in society there is rarely space and funding for the things they are doing. I know people who had to move their ateliers 4 times in 10 years, just because the landlords use them to make the rental/area more attractive to a better pating clientel and then kick them out.
Life isn't stable, if it was it wouldn't have managed to stick around for this long. Hundreds of millions of people are impoverished, are they unable to make art?
I'm also not sure what your suggestion is. Should aspiring artists create corporations and live from the labour of other people, to create something you'd consider freedom for themselves while intruding on the freedom of others? Or do you consider it freedom to be in someone else's service under the threat of poverty?
I am not sure what you mean, the history of art is a history of rich/powerful people giving poor/lower ranking people money for doing said art. Artists have never been truly free in that sense — thst was my point.
Sure the art scene in parts has become entrepreneurial, but quite frankly most commercial art is either tasteless shit for tasteless customers, the works of old artists who are two decades away from dying or the works of a popular one-trick-pony on borrowed time. Who has a more hard time here are the newcomers or people who are doing it to hold up a mirror to society. But your society won't get the artists that are two decades from dying if they didn't make it somehow up to that point.
Now I gladly live in a european nation where society means that we look out for each other and I'd have no problem if more of my tax money goes towards culture. Now I know the sentiment towards commons and investing in your own infrastructure and society is way different in the US, but I don't even see it that way. I profit from the money I put there by being allowed to live in a society where people can dare to try things that are the opposite of commercial no-brainers.
"I am not sure what you mean, the history of art is a history of rich/powerful people giving poor/lower ranking people money for doing said art. Artists have never been truly free in that sense — thst was my point."
To me the history of art is quite a bit broader than european elites wanting to protect their investments and tax evasion schemes, basically 'haussing' the value of what their predecessors commissioned from painters.
Among other things, there's what might be called 'folk art'. Songs and music that narrate more or less mythical history, a practice predating european urban elites with their mecenate style of commissioned paintings. 'Street art'. Drawing a dick on a random brick wall is a very old tradition.
Personally I'm not sure I believe in commercial art. That would be an expression and possibly an exploitation of economic relations, and not an expression or invention of humanity. In part my suspicion against the idea that relative wealth and convenience would be good for art stems from this, it implies a disconnect from most of contemporary and historic human life.
Most artists I know would love to have stability, yet in society there is rarely space and funding for the things they are doing. I know people who had to move their ateliers 4 times in 10 years, just because the landlords use them to make the rental/area more attractive to a better pating clientel and then kick them out.