>Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
Yeahp, it's pure ideology.
In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity.
So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation.
The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist.
This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media.
Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk
>Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done.
No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning.
But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion.
That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)