Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha... Nice ham-fisted non-sequiturial attempt to make the artists the privileged ones here. Who can and can't go to at school is irrelevant. My example clearly showed that you're understanding of the "economy of art" is not even close to representative. Commercial artists operate at all levels of society, all over the world, and have for a really long time. Nobody making beautiful hand-carved and painted signs for…
> non-artists to use other people's skills instead Here is where I think you're wrong: Everyone is a potential artist. Many never have the opportunity because of economic reasons: some people don't have the time to cultivate the mechanical skills necessary to render their vision. All artists pull from the work of others constantly. That is 'using other people's skills'. It is absolutely privileged to have the opportu…
Being a professional artist isn't fucking magic. It's not winning the lottery or even getting drafted for a pro sports team. It's a large group of regular fucking careers just like any other but creativity makes up a larger percentage of their professional cognitive toolkit. I know a workaday oil painter who's neither well-known nor rich but went to college to learn how to be an oil painter and that's how he comfortably pays his bills. He paints seaside landscapes, wealthy people buy them to put in their vacation homes, and that's how he makes his money. He was in college right along side with graphic designers, animators, architects, product designers, user interface designers, and all manor of other professional artists. Just like any other non-licensed white collar profession, people who didn't go to school are in the business, but it's harder. I also know a professional comic book artist, many animators, sculptors that work in product development, and plenty of other professional artists that built normal careers like any other white collar professional. The fact that not everybody can go to art school to build an art career doesn't change the disposition of professional artists any more than not everybody being able to afford to go to medical school affects the disposition of doctors, and having "the soul of a healer" doesn't really enter the goddamned equation, does it?
Whether you're being deliberately obtuse or are painfully ignorant about something you've got a lot of strong, baseless opinions about, you're obviously not going to cut the bullshit and be honest with yourself. The reason you have to delve into all of these pseudo-philosophical mental gymnastics is because you're wrong, but you really don't want to be, so you're trying to construct a reality in which you're right. That's not how reality works. Using people's work without their permission to make a for-profit system to compete with them in their professional marketplace is not moral no matter how big of a castle of bullshit logic you build around it.
Bye bye. I'm going to let you hang out in your little land of make-believe by yourself.