When Heath walked over, he saw a man whose looks and clothes had a distinctly artistic air sitting there, looking at Zoroark uneasily. When he noticed Heath approaching, a blush spread across his face. Clearly, he still had a sense of shame, unlike those people who took stock for their businesses from roadside fridges offering free drinking water. From his clothes and the things beside the table, Heath could roughly guess his profession.
A painter, or perhaps an artist? Painting was an art-school subject, after all-oil painting, ink painting, sketching, and so on. Recently, though, something called AI art had appeared in the Pokémon world. Its arrival had supposedly cost quite a few painters their livelihoods and dealt a blow to the surrealist school as well. After all, AI could swiftly produce a painting comparable to a photograph. In the future, perhaps the biggest distinction painters could advertise would be that their work was handmade?
This man, however, certainly looked like a painter who was not doing very well. The wealth gap in that profession was truly wider than the gap between humans and dogs. A top painter could sell a work ordinary people could not understand for millions. Tens of millions were no problem either, and it might even fetch over a hundred million. An impoverished painter, however, might not get even a hundred for his entire life's work. The disparity was that absurd, and the man before him was clearly someone whose life was not going so well.
Many people also had misconceptions about painters, such as believing that their works doubled in value after they died. In reality, when many obscure painters died, their works often ended up being burned, unless someone with an agenda targeted them for speculation. In that case, even paintings picked up for