i play the piano, the clarinet family, and the bass guitar.

and yourself?

I too come from the cultural/intellectual sphere but think that appreciation of art and worth to artists doesn’t have to rise from learning.

I have to note, for example, that most great collectors of art are not artists them selfs.

True, the general level of cultural knowledge is far too low, and should be raised, but one should still not dismiss the non-learned out of hand.

One reason is that many artists like other professionals nowadays suffer from overspecialization and are in fact badly in need of input from and exchange with other spheres of human life, experience and culture.

One of the greatest areas of growth in any sense is between elements. Overspecialization and too little exchange leads to a smaller possible sphere for growth and improvement and even stagnation, corruption and death.

Awareness of this is especially important to the arts since one of their most important functions is to mirror and provide commentary on society and it’s issues and more generally on the human experience itself. If it looses this it may loose it’s worth to all but artist in that it may still shed some light on interesting techniques and so on. And I see no better way for this to come to pass than personal contact. It will not rise from theory by itself.

Even exchange with people from the most surprising backgrounds can be highly rewarding. Good art should, in my opinion, have (at least some) aspects which appeal to most people in some deep-founded way. Becoming attuned to creating in such a way is very important to artists.
In fact it is sad to see the bad and unhealthy attitudes displayed by some of the supposedly “wise”.

In conclusion I’d say that I think people tend to be drawn to people which are a bit different from them selfs so that their relationships benefit from the life, growth and interplay between them and that it may not be necessary that partners work in the same field to significantly share in each others interests and provide each other with enlightening views or commentary on each others work and interests.