[TheOtherHobbes]

By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.

That's quite a niche view.

In fact art is an overlap of many different kinds of markets selling to many different kinds of customers - from people buying phone wallpapers online, to tourists buying souvenirs on holiday, to oligarchs laundering money through prestige purchases.

And many others.

A community gallery is going to intersect with a couple of those, but not all of them. Sustainable funding is a goal, but maximising income isn't.

Financial success doesn't sane wash narcissistic entitlement, of which there is plenty outside of the arts.

[krisoft]

> By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.

And Vincent van Gogh is not. Or was not a great artist, then he died and become a great artist somehow suddenly after his death. (at least by that definition, which just to make it clear, I don't agree with.)

[specialist]

I'm fine with "remembered somehow" as another useful definition for "a great artist".

More cynically: van Gogh was only successfully monetized posthumously.