Artists aren't taught about the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff (which gives us an upper limit on how many Creative/Curious folk any population can support) or the Laws of Supply and Demand.<p>You can round up the best and the most influential people in the visual arts world and ask them what happens when Supply (Content) massively overshoots Demand (total Eyeballs and Time available) on the planet? And they don't have a single idea or theory. And they are in charge of Art Schools.<p>It's left to Economists to think about it (see the UN report on the Attention Economy for implications).<p>Art schools don't teach kids the implications of their existence within an Attention Economy, where Attention acts as like different types of currencies. While visual artists act like the currency printing press. They are used like front line troops (ie cannon fodder) in a War govts/corporations/politicians wage over a Finite Non-growing Global Pool of Attention. In the same way wars are waged over other finite resources like Land, Oil, Gold, Water etc. Where more and more content is produced to wage the war over finite Attention.<p>In economic history it took people a long time to understand Inflation is connected to the increase of the Money Supply - rate of printing money greater than the rate of goods entering the market.<p>Same story is repeating with the visual arts world where there is more content than there are eyeballs (and that is even before AI showed up). Most of the visual art world is hardly aware. They are reacting to it all, just like merchants/bankers of yore, who had to deal with all kinds of chaos/bubbles/system wide meltdowns as Kings/Govts printed currency too fast. They didnt see the connection and blamed each other, the gods and the jews.