I think the main problem with art is the same thing that plagues the other liberal arts: no matter what you do, as long as it’s rooted in the conventional, someone’s already done it better than you. It doesn’t matter how much you like sculpting, you’re never going to create a figure better than The David or La Pieta. It doesn’t matter how much you like painting still life’s, youre not going to paint a scene better than the Girl with Pearl Earrings or the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. There are hundreds of years of artists who have done the styles which are more appealing to the eye/convention (and their works are already in the public domain), so why even try?
I think this attitude permeates all of the liberal arts. There was a brief stint back in college where I was considering getting a double major in history. I had taken a few years of Latin back in high school, so I wanted to focus my projects on the transition from the Roman Empire to Roman Catholicism. My adviser flat out told me, no, don’t study that, it’s already been done and you’ll never discover anything new. I eventually gave up on the history major and stuck to my stem degree because I realized you can’t do anything with history that doesn’t focus on identity politics. The way I see it is that historians know they will never discover anyone as great as Caesar or as influential as Cicero. All the great western figures have already been found and are known, so why waste your time when you will never contribute anything to history en par discovering the Rosetta Stone or translating a Hellenistic manuscript. It’s better to focus on what you can discover (women, minorities history) and hype it up to be en par the greats even though it’s objectively not.
So many great people have devoted their lives to traditional, good styles of art that it simply does not make sense for an artist to try and out compete them. Taping a banana to a wall will drive many more clicks than “this artist drew a portrait that is almost as good as Picasso” and who can state the objective goodness of just screaming randomly when there is no figure to compare it to?
