I think Steemit is a better place for talking about art than any platform I've found since Livejournal, and it might be better than LJ. Whether that's talking about making art, collecting art, critical discourse, curation in the real-world sense, all of that has an incredible potential the way the platform is now.

On the flipside, for displaying and selling art it's not that great. And I guess my deep question for this topic is how do we improve that aspect of things without crippling the part that's working, which is considerably rarer.

Livejournal was not good at that at all. Usenet was not good at that at all for the text-focused art it was really good for discussion of. (Fiction, poetry, creative nonfic, etc.) Patreon really isn't good at either of them. I don't think this is a problem we can usefully look at others' solutions for because I don't know of any.

Somebody's going to have to come up with something groundbreaking to make it work.