Deresiewicz's story is inconsistent. First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their p

Deresiewicz's story is inconsistent. First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their patrons, who essentially sheltered them from the cold realities of the market. Later, he laments that now artists are crushed by the market and can't have any stability that Bach et. al. enjoyed. He's missing a ton of contemporary working artists, who still have their patrons - visual artists working in game dev, musicians composing music for movies, commercials, video games etc. These people have steady income, just like Bach did. Of course, they're not really working on what they'd like to be working on, but neither really did Da Vinci (he was known to procrastinate a ton when asked to produce another boring portrait of somebody's daugther - a portrait which comically now could fetch tens of millions of dollars).