Art is *sometimes* selfish

It seems to me as someone who is surrounded by art a lot of the time that there are a lot of artists but not a lot of art appreciators. Often times an artist makes something as an attempt to be understood. When something becomes popular, it's because that thing is relatable, but then the consumer is not actually actively seeking to understand the artist, the consumer is using the art to understand him/herself. I mean no one listens to a song about heartbreak and goes like, "Wow, I totally get that heartbreak sucks. I can empathize. I will now participate in an act of mutual understanding with this creator that I don't know and find meaning and humanity in the fact that two people so far apart can achieve such an intimate understanding." It's more like "Yes, someone understands me! This song resounds very deeply with my experience. This song represents my pain. Heartbreak sucks. I will now go listen to this song on repeat forever and ever." Notice the first reaction "I understand them" and the second reaction "they understand me." You can also look at this from the perspective of the artist creating a song about heartbreak and publishing that song. The artist is most likely looking for someone to understand them, and probably is not seeking to empathize with others. A more relevant example of this though, when someone makes artwork that tries to communicate an idea (for example, criticize the state of government or something) the artwork very rarely finds an audience of people who are like, "Hmm, this makes sense, maybe I will re-evaluate my own stances." It is usually communicated to an audience of people who already hold the view that the artwork was trying to communicate, and then they use that art to validate their opinion. Lesson of the day, art is self-centered whether you're the creator or the consumer!!! woohoo
Actually I was probably being unfair by overgeneralizing the term "art" because art can also refer to things for entertainment purposes only, or purely nonfictional works (portraits etc) or the undramatic works of Debussy or something. So when I say art I don't mean all art. Probably only a small part of art. This is my attempt at trying to not overgeneralize while making my statements. It's really hard not to do and everyone does it. And also no one can get anywhere without overgeneralizing things because then there would be so many asterisks in life that no one would understand anything and everything would be chaos. Soo yeah.