Art (and Writing) for Art (and Writing's) Sake

I'm thinking about this now that I'm getting rejections for both my novels (agents and publishers) and paintings (galleries and shows). I'm going to set aside for the sake of argument that my "stuff" isn't that good. It might not be. But what I'm thinking about isn't so much what is good and bad, but the market.
Yes, the market.
We live in a market economy. The arts, however haughty or insulated from it (mostly via the Academy), do direct themselves to getting "out there" and out there (we'll discuss the Internet in a moment) used to mean for writing, publishing, and for paintings, representation by a gallery and ultimately sales to collectors.

Segue for a moment to poetry. Do poets "have a market"? I imagine they do, though the self financed chap book has had more time to upgrade its image from vanity publishing for some time. The conceit is that the "masses" aren't really interested in poetry so, given we live in the Dark Ages, the poets have to support each other, i.e. publish each other, read each other. True, one would be hard pressed to find a poet who made a fulltime living out of poetry, though they may exist. I mean ones that ARE NOT teachers or somehow employed by educational institutions. So poetry is on life support.

John Updike recently opined about the future of "literary" fiction. Is it going the way of poetry, he asked. He elaborated that going the way of poetry meant that this kind of more (difficult) fiction would be read (in the future, even near future) primarily the the ones who WRITE it as well as students assigned it in their classes.

Let's assume for the moment this is true, at least a true trend. One can see in the New York Times Book Review, that slowly non-fiction has become dominant judged by the number of books reviewed. Fiction, at least fiction of the highbrow sort that the NYT would review is not in demand like it used to be, even recently in the postwar years of Updike, Roth, Cheever and Carver. People still read fiction (even on paper) but the "genres" take up the massive amount of readership. In Japan, the fiction lists are being crowded out by a new type of literature even simpler still--novels text-messaged on cell phones, eventually collected and printed as novels. People like them.

Back to markets. Markets are what people buy. Let's review.
Images:
Screen -- television, broadcast is "free" (though McLuhan said they price is your attention)
-- cable is purchased.
--computer -- mostly "free" (except porn and downloaded movies and some game sites)
"Wall art" -- how many people buy original art? Not decorator art?
--posters and inexpensive art
--what is the market for "walls"? How is it fulfilled?

To Be Continued