As an artist, this is a thing I grapple with constantly. I've been lucky enough to find a path where I can make art that is mostly designed around what pleases

As an artist, this is a thing I grapple with constantly. I've been lucky enough to find a path where I can make art that is mostly designed around what pleases myself, and accrete a modest audience that wants enough of the same things and can't find it many other places. I'm almost paying my bills on it nowadays. Gallery art is its own thing, greatly divorced from "getting good at drawing" and "making art that speaks to a lot of people". Making art that you have to be a rarified aesthete to understand what simply doesn't appeal to all those peons is a route to making work that stupidly rich assholes can be persuaded makes them look like Important People Of Taste to own, especially when everyone knows that your last piece went for a very large number; it's investment games, status games, and probably no small amount of money-laundering.