Have you ever thought about what did it take to be a painter, musician, sculptor or any other artistic personality a couple of hundred years ago? Let me help you a bit with that: you had to have money in the first place.
Being an artist takes a great amount of practice, and to practice a lot you need time. And the finer your craft gets the more time you need. And, yeah, you still need at least food to survive. And maybe paint, or stone, and, I bet, brushes or other tools might come handy as well. Probably you would also want a studio of some sort. Having all that would require financing. And most of the families those days wouldn’t be able to afford it. You might argue, that those families could have sent their talented children to be an apprentice of an artist, and you would be right. They could. But how many artists were there around, and how often did they require another pair of hands in their studios. I’d say the chances of an average kid growing into an artist those days were pretty low.
And now imagine you want to paint something tomorrow having zero background in painting. I think it would be much easier. In most countries you can have your paint, easel, brushes, etc. delivered to your door next day, or you can visit the store and buy a “starter kit” yourself. Then you open youtube, and, voila, you are paining.
The ease of getting close to the tools and materials you need to express yourself resulted in an incredible amount, an explosion if you will, of art styles in the 20th-21st centuries.
Let’s take street art for example. Various engravings in the public places have been known since Ancient Egypt and Greece, but the scale is incomparable to nowadays. In the early days of modern street art it received negative reactions, but later started to gain public acceptance, and even producing world-famous artists like Banksy, for example. The public opinion is shifted so far that cities are starting to ask street artists to do mural paintings to decorate the area.
Take Utrecht for example, local residence of this Dutch city cooperated with Jan Is De Man to transform boring living house facade into a fascinating bookshelf. The full story of how street art can unite people can be found here:
Another example is a city of St.Petersburg in Florida. It attracts artists from the whole world who do their artwork on the streets. This huge open air gallery in its turn attracts tons of tourists. And the tourists made gallerists to open their galleries in the neighbourhood. A guide to most important works of street art of St.Pete, FL can be found here:
Literally every continent has cities which attract people with murals: Lisbon, Berlin, Bristol, Mexico City, New York, Granada, Penang, Melbourne, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and many many others.
Maybe it is time for you to go out, ask locals if they want their street to look different, and, you know, do what artists do.