As long as stuff doesn't fade for 50 years, are artists bothered? After you're dead, nobody is going to come and complain at you for using a non-durable choice of pigment.
A lot of successful artists are very conscious of perservation and archival concerns. It's not just that basic professional level art materials are very deliberately marketed as archival quality: it's a fashion these days to paint on metal surfaces, either sheets of copper, or aluminum composites like Dibond, used by sign painters. Dibond is two sheets of aluminum sandwiching a 2mm layer of polyethylene.
What these surfaces have in common is that they're dimensionally stable: they don't change in size depending on temperature or humidity, and they're chemically impervious to the ground layer. Oil paints can degrade linen canvas over time as the oil seeps into the fibers and oxidizes.
After your dead, no one comes back for you. Instead, your most visible legacy in this world slowly falls apart, changing color, getting brittle, and looking decrepit before it falls apart. Artists aren't invulnerable to vanity.
> As long as stuff doesn't fade for 50 years, are artists bothered? After you're dead, nobody is going to come and complain at you for using a non-durable choice of pigment.
I'm sure many artists aren't creating for wholly hedonistic reasons, and instead want to create things that will endure.
