I'm no artist but when I had the desire to learn no obstacles would discourage me in my quest to afford materials and the process of obtaining a new watercolour book would take weeks and weeks I think the first third of school summer holidays actually.

now I'm wondering if I inadvertently lost interest in the impatience of adolescence...

but access to incredible artists materials is equally amazingly nearly ubiquitous in the western world along with peak uninstructed leisure time for young people to dabble but unfortunately not study and practice and master their tools in the dedicated way I remember absolutely everyone who had aspirations applied themselves in my youth.

by no means do I mean to hand waving dismiss the younger generations for laziness, but the economic realities are radically different from the seventies and maybe we haven't culturally adjusted quite yet to the increase in availability of purported artwork which might have formerly been graded as something less. Certainly the self regarding high social status of the art world at the time I was growing up excluded too many worthy creative talents from serious consideration, but that seems to have flip flopped to most liberally apply the glaze of authenticity over a entirety of output with unclear to me discrimination.

There was a joke I saw the other day on Mastodon that "if NFTs actually worked as promised then the furries would have invented them years ago". While an amusing joke, it's also one of those things with buried bits of truth that stick out like wisdom. The furry commission markets have generally seemed to be stable over the life of the internet, the prices haven't converged to zero, and generally there seems to be respect for the labor costs of the artists in that market. Obviously a lot of other art markets wish they were that stable, and it's a weird benchmark (thus the humor to it), but it's still a benchmark.