@Pascal Monett
I am commenting only on these specific quotes from your post:
: how are the artists who don't get paid manage to pay for their food ? Not to mention rent, heating, and all the rest.
Like anyone else, get a job that pays enough money to cover these expenses.
Most people do work they don't like purely because the income from that work is what they need to live on.
I hate my job. My preferred job would be to lounge about all day at the beach, or playing computer games online and basically just, well, doing nothing productive. But since no one will pay me for that, I need to work at a job that pays money even tho I don't like the work.
No one is entitled to earn a living from doing what they want, what their dream job is. A lucky few find that. Most of the rest of us do what we have to to earn money.
The stereotype of poor university artists or in places like Los Angeles the chance of your waiter being an out of work actor being extremely high is because they have to do side jobs to make enough money.
An artist of whatever description (musician, lyricist, novelist, graphic artist, or whatever) is not entitled to make a living from their copyrights. The point of copyrights is not to guarantee a living wage for an artist, it is to prevent other people who didn't create the work from making money - unless authorised by the copyright holder - from their work.
If an author writes a crappy book that no-one wants to read, they are not entitled to make a living wage from that work.
If an artist - or anyone else - can make a living from their preferred profession, their dream job, the work they love doing and they wake up wanting to go to work, more power to them.
However, if an artist is not a good enough artist to make a living wage from their art, they need to put their art on the backburner as a hobby and find some other way to make a living. Making a living from art doesn't necessarily mean writing the next great novel, or an amazing painting, or taking the money shot as a paparrazi. It can mean wage-paying jobs that involve the art where the author doesn't get the copyright, such as writing code for a tech company, or writing news articles for a newspaper, or producing a TV show for a network, or being a sign writer, all jobs where the employer, not the artist, gets the copyright (usually, employment contract depending).