There are still the huge problems of supporting the creative life. In fact, health insurance, rent, transportation, and college loans make the self-supporting artistic life harder than it was forty years ago. Keeping it all together was the artistic dilemma of the nineties. I think that people in the art world are collaborating more than they did before. Collaboration is easier now that people can send their music, their essays, their drafts around the world in seconds.
Collaboration is aided by less rigid lines between fields too.
Poet Robert Creeley collaborates with painters, photographers, jazz musicians, other writers. Young people have been brought up on MTV, Sesame Street. They have an amazing visual acuity and no fear at combining media. Hip hop is music AND poetry and dance. They take it for granted that David Byrne and Laurie Anderson compose songs, perform, dance, make films, paint.