Wait until you see art... There is no regulation, it comes with probably no return policy. It requires one person to do -- art doesn't need capital to start at all. Yet art is insanely expensive. Do you rather be a programmer, an engineer, a fashion designer, a woodworker, or an artist? I don't have a good answer for your question, but I think the idea here is everyone needs a living.
Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.
That's not true. There are a billion people putting their art on the Internet every day: DeviantArt, Pinterest, Flickr, Shutterfly, and other sites with fan fiction, manuscripts of books, cartoons, millions of homemade videos, music sites. The average price of all of this art is zero. Only a very tiny fraction of people make money with art.
First, saying art is cheap because billions pieces of art on Deviant Art are free is like saying code is cheap because billions of lines of code published every day on GitHub are free. Average you pay for code is zero, by that logic?
Second, the Internet can only host a very specific kind of art (digitalized) that is a very tiny fraction of art that you can experience in a museum or an exhibition. Where is my paint oil on canvas with the beautiful texture and smell I could experience on DeviantArt?
You have to count what you have to pay for an artist/coder to make what you want, not what they want. Then we are talking about the same thing.
There's a lot of terrible stuff on DeviantArt. But there's also a lot of great stuff on there too I've seen.
And then there's the stuff that combines both; beautifully rendered, highly detailed work that tells an interesting story in one image, that's also ultimately "just" fan-art for Rick and Morty. Humans are weird sometimes.
I don't think so... I think we are being spoiled by the vast amounts of. I am one of the generations who had formative experiences before internet, and I would have been completely transfixed by the stuff on say, deviantart. I could look at weird stuff in the library for hours sometimes, and half of that was not very good at all.
You'd be surprised how cheaply art students at your local college would be willing to recreate pieces for you. These people are already quite skilled by their 20s and it's no problem for them to make a copy of a piece. Their original pieces made for class can be found for next-to-nothing.
Second-hand shops are full of wonderful pieces for cheap.
Photographs and digital art are extremely cheap to print and frame. My local UPS store will do huge prints for a few bucks.
Mass produced art, like that from Ikea, is usually less than $40 a piece, a lot of it is less than $10. Homegoods and Hobby Lobby is another good place to shop for cheap mass-produced pieces.
You can do-it-yourself for the costs of materials. You don't need much skill to toss some colors onto a canvas.
Art can be cheap and it can be found everywhere. It doesn't need to be some hand-painted master piece. A printed picture or photograph in a frame will work just fine. Or a simple vase with some flowers.
Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.