Why can't anybody who wants become an artist by throwing paint at a canvas?

Limited market.
One of the best “works of art” I did was in college when we laid a large canvas on the ground and splattered paint on it from the second floor balcony. It was a masterpiece but no one offered to buy it so after getting the grade I trashed it.,

You can. By all means, have at it. There is no guarantee of success, though, unless you can manage to find a buyer who is a greater fool than the artist.

That drives me nuts. If it’s something I could do than it’s not art. I’m no artist!

Art is subjective. What you choose to do and with what materials is up to you. You can call yourself an ‘artist’ until you’re blue in the face, but if you never find an audience, it’s just a hobby.

Fine art is one of those areas where the supply happens before the demand sometimes.

Commercial art is a bit different in that designers are hired to solve a specific visual problem for a client. The intended audience is usually well researched and design decisions are made in an effort to appeal to that audience.

In either case, there is no guarantee that a connection will be made with an audience who will then, validate your work with a reaction and an opinion.

Meaning, there is no “art” until it finds an audience, IMHO.

You have to be able to that and write an impenetrable artist’s statement.

Nothing is as fascinating or more instructive than the intersection where art meets money. The cruelty is that so few artists (or would be artists) have any idea how to negotiate traffic in an environment where “there’s no accounting for taste.” I’m convinced that the 2 greatest and most successful cynics yet born are Andy Warhol and Thomas Kinkade

dammit! @thorninmud beat me to it.

That’s not really art. Art would be getting a large canvas and covering myself and a female partner with different colors of paint and then have sex on the canvas. That could be sold as art. I guarantee you someone would buy that shit. Simply throwing paint on canvas does not make a statement or show creativity.

One of the names you’re thinking of is Jackson Pollack. And he was a genius.

So, do you think artists of this ilk make the painting based on some pre-conceived notion or do you think, like I do, that they do the painting and then make up the narrative for it?

@rojo Many of them would say that preconceptions don’t play a big role in their process, because they aren’t working toward a “product”. They’re more interested in the process itself, the feedback loop in which the artist initiates developments on the canvas, but those developments in turn inform the artist’s next move, so that artist and canvas mutually evolve toward an unforeseen end.

In that way of working, “art” is more verb than noun. The art is the dance between artist and canvas, and the resulting piece is just a record of the dance.

@thorninmud Actually, I can understand and appreciate that. The journey is the destination.

That is not genuine Fine Art. Jackson Pollock did that. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods such stuff would not be called art. Modern artists are con artists. They have lost the skill of the great masters and substitute such immature eccentricity for genuine creativity. They do something eccentric and then invent excuses for it. Sadly, many people believe such absurdity. Thorinmud makes no sense. That is just an elaborate overly-contrived excuse for being an unskilled painter. As I said and this demonstrates, modern artists are con artists who can convince people that such absurdity is profound.