Even under capitalism, there is PLENTY of demand for artists: Graphic designers, interior design, manufacturing beautiful items, architecture, civil engineering, sound engineers. Almost EVERYTHING requires art to some degree yet you have to be like the best of the best to get paid for an artistic career and even then your work is seen as frivolous. As if simply being an artist for a living is compensation enough.
Meanwhile, some dipshit on Wall Street does fuck all to improve the world and is showered with both money and praise just for waking up and doing over-glorified gambling.
I'm not an artist, but props to those who are, they are unironically incredibly important to making life somewhat bearable yet are criminally taken for granted.
Pardon the rant.
When I graduated high school, I wanted to be in theater. After some time and a few jobs, a director who was paying me $5/hour (not including all my unpaid overtime) said something to the effect of, "there are 50,000 theater jobs in America, and 200,000 people trying to get them". All art jobs are like that, which gives the people with the money the leverage they need to pay you as little as humanly possible for your work, and all of the cultural conditioning around art (that it's "frivolous" or whatever) is an outgrowth of that fact.
I quit theater and now I work for the city in a chronically short-staffed department (after trying a few different things in between). My job is boring but overall things are a lot better lmao.