While wondering what a talented representational painter could be painting today, Donald Pittenger points out that such artists are very limited by the market:

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that commissions for representational easel or mural paintings of historical, religious or mythological events are rare. Elite thinking in the USA holds war to be evil (unless someone on their side wants to fight one), so that rules out battle scenes. Nationalism is also a no-no, so depictions of other historical scenes of the sort common before the 20th century are also likely to be scarce. That same elitist group isn't especially keen on religion (unless perhaps one worships Gaia), so cathedral and church building isn't the growth industry it was in, say, the 14th century and the production of religious paintings follows suit. This suggests that any return to the subjects common from the Renaissance to the Great War will have to be gradual and, at first, stealthy.

The problem is, of course, that paintings are expensive and thus the only market for them are society's elites. For all their flaws our elites might have better taste in art than the rest of us (and I'll admit they're more intelligent and harder-working, too), but that doesn't matter. An art form that is made for only one segment of society is more constrained than one with broader appeal.

That's a nice thing about music - because it is cheap and practical to amplify and duplicate it exists in a great variety of forms which appeal to all segments of society. Paintings can be reproduced, of course, but for reasons I don't want to get into here, we do not treat amplified or recorded music as "less authentic". As Denis Dutton wrote in The Art Instinct, "Authenticity, which in the arts means at the most profound communion with another human soul, is something we are destined by evolution to want from literature, music, painting, and the other arts" - and reproductions of paintings just don't give it to us.

Because music is less constrained, we've got music for elites, plenty of music for young people who don't yet have much responsibility in life, and we've even got music for people with real jobs. With painting, or to an even greater degree sculpture, that would just not be viable. Though most of the bands I'm currently in attract mostly people with university degrees and university students, it's good to also sometimes play music for people I have a lot more in common with. Painters don't really have that option outside of the fields of illustration and advertising which come with a whole another set of limitations.

To close, here is one of my favorite songs which anyone can enjoy (except for those too morally righteous to tolerate songs about gambling, sports, theft, illegal immigration etc.), but which is a lot more meaningful to people with real responsibilities.