I wonder if art is something you can teach, not nurture. Of course, studying so many artists and techniques and history is not a bad thing, but it will only feed some seed that is already there. Most likely the artists you study are people who never had a formal education in arts, and broke whatever rule was in place.
Perhaps people feel “entitled” to a career as an artist for going to art school, but your work will be admired or not without your diploma by its side.
That being said, most famous artists had wealthy sponsors or found their inner businessperson inside them.
Someone told me once at most 500 people made their fortunes as movie composers all over the world. There were 10,000 excellent artists trying the same thing in Los Angeles alone.
Were this the case, you’d expect a higher percentage of art school grads to be good enough at business to make their livings as artists.
Most well-known artists had classical art training. Not necessarily college degrees, but some kind of formal education in their respective media. Even the ones who “broke the rules” like Picasso and Mondrian and Warhol and Pollock first mastered figurative art using traditional materials.
I think that’s part what I said. I am not sure if there is a cause and not just correlation. Yes, knowing how to mix your inks and prepare your canvas is important, but whatever comes after that is unrelated. And like the composers example, there is so much market that can absorb all kinds of genius.
What I’d expect is that the dilution of mass media as gateways to riches would reveal inumerous talents: and that’s the case, I think. Sadly, this comes at the expense of a low (or no) paying audience. The world wins, not so much the artists.
I think it’s hard to derive conclusions from this kind of data. The mismatch between the number of people that get art degrees and the number that end up as working artists is interesting, but not all that surprising, particularly when they have included writers and even athletes as “working artists” - two groups that I would think are quite unlikely to have pusued arts degrees. I imagine many, if not most, of the people who got arts degrees never planned to try to make a living as working artists, so implying that arts degrees are failing to prepare them to do so may be unfair. I mean, how many people who study history become “working historians”?
I believed the same thing when I went to college, and I got what I thought was a lot out of it. But at the same time now I have an engineering degree, yet no experience - and no one has been able to connect the dots of how do you get that magical 2-5 years of experience everyone requires…
I think it was that New Zealand cryptographer who had the story of a company he had with his collegemates. The company had a cyclic structure instead of hierarchical so it was impossible to reach anyone on the top, the phone and fax numbers were spread over several miles area, and after the second year or so the address was a parking lot, but it gave them the “experience” on their resumes.
I thought being happy and financially secure was meant to be bad for artistic output, anyway? 
You can’t break the rules if you don’t know what they are.
Yes, this would be a lot more illuminating alongside the same comparisons for other fields, and also an “employed as artist, but didn’t get an art degree” chart.
I am also personally less interested in the strict definition of “The Arts” than with the amount of people who get to bring creativity and panache to their jobs in a wide variety of fields. In addition, I’d like to see some energy injected into the ideal of allowing each person to divide their time equally between their creative passions, their contributions to the economy, politics and family, rather than just pushing for artists to be able to make a living from doing art as a 9-5. I love drawing and animating, and have a pretty healthy couple of drawers in the old filing cabinet full of stuff I really enjoyed creating, but also get a lot of satisfaction for being a data developer at a non-profit. I’d love to be able to put more time into my creative pursuits, but wouldn’t want to give up my particular work either. Work shouldn’t be so time consuming and soul crushing that a person can’t also create.
It’s like saying you can’t break the laws if you don’t know them.
Well-known and successful “outsider artists” are pretty few and far-between, though. Most laypeople are more likely to be familiar with the work of Cheetah the chimp than any of the other outsider artists on that list.
FTFY. 
Art is a tough field to get recognized at…
True, but probably no more than any other field. How many famous hydroelectric engineers can you name? How many outsider hydroelectric engineers can you name?
“You’re wiring up that dam just the way The Man wants you to! Think outside the box with your wiring, green is now the hot leg! Power to the people!”
Gonna use that on my next speeding ticket …
Art is rather poorly defined. There are likely more people attempting art than attempting engineering.
Kaplan, Pelton, Francis…
Outsider, or engineers?
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
Good luck.
Thank you , I am going to need that …Haha
I’m the Development Director of a nonprofit arts organization, and we have an Arts Institute that specifically prepares students to go to arts colleges. We have quite a bit of data on our alumni over the past 14 years. Almost all of our students come from solidly middle class families. After college graduation, few are unemployed, many work in creative fields, and more than a handful are working artists. We specifically prepare students for CAREER-oriented arts learning, which may be what’s missing in many schools.
Of course, we also get college scholarships for our students (an average of $60,000 per student), so they aren’t straddled with overwhelming debt at the end of their 4 years.
We are also using the arts with economically disadvantaged students, and using it the same way other schools use sports: training them in the arts to get scholarships to college and break the cycle of multi-generational poverty.
