> Not all artists are like that, and IME the more successful and experienced ones are the least likely to think that way, but the attitude is quite common with beginners who haven't accomplished much yet.
Lots of beginners in every field think that they're God's gift to whatever it is that they've just started. They're going to change the world, etc. That comes with the territory of being a beginner. Usually they mellow with age and experience.
>I have more admiration for someone who's laying down cement in 100 degree weather to put a roof over their family's heads, or someone who's putting in the hours massaging mindnumbingly boring spreadsheets to be able to support themselves, or someone putting in overtime at a hospital. The expectation that people must support you and give you preferential treatment because you're expressing yourself never made sense to me.
Just because you don't see the hours of training and production that goes into something, doesn't mean it isn't there. I might spend 10,000 hours practicing to spend 200 hours writing a novel that you read in 20 hours. I might spend four years in college and ten years writing a computer program that you'll use once. Lots of artwork is produced as work for hire. That doesn't make it that much different than any other job. A trained professional getting payment for services rendered is how things have worked since antiquity. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was commissioned to, not just because he was expressing himself
> You always see signs exhorting you to "support your local artists", yet you never see encouragement to support your local roofers.
You see signs asking you to support local roofers all the time. What do you think all of those commercials on radio, television, print media, billboards, etc. are that advertising all of the roofing services?
Roofers produce roofs. Chefs produce food. Artists produce art. It takes labor to produce art, and if you want good art, it also takes years of training and practice. But somehow working to produce art is seen as 'lesser' than doing manual physical labor.
It's weird. It's expected that in most professions even beginners deserve to get paid. But the arts are somehow different. There's this expectation that artists should produce works for the benefit of society (and don't forget, 'art' is much more than just drawing pretty pictures, it's also the vast field of fine art, music, movies, television, writing, and a lot of other media) but that the work should be free. There's this unspoken feeling that since lots of art is easy to appreciate, it must have been easy to create, so paying for it is a waste of money. But have you ever tried to paint a picture? Compose a song? Write a novel? It's hard. It takes time. It can take thousands of hours of practice before you make anything good.
It's kind of like arguing that a programmer asking for money for the programming work that they do is somehow shaming people into supporting them for typing all day instead of doing real work that commands real pay like bricklaying or cattle ranching.