Cynicism protects artists from having to be vulnerable to experience, in fact it keeps them from feeling and experiencing anything but the blackest side of life, since that is where they choose to place their focus. It is easy to choose to live a life of tragedy. It is a greater challenge to face life as it is as a whole and see it through. The reward for artists sensitive to all experience is access to a broad variety of feeling and therefore an ability to empathise with a broad variety of human perspectives. Great artists also get to genuinely feel such things as joy and wonder.
Great artists make a lifetime committment to expressing their experience.
They don't expect greatness in their twenties then spend the rest of their lives bitter because it didn't work out. Great artists are not separate or above the rest of society. They too participate in humanity by virtue of being human. Great artists do have the capacity to make significant contributions to the future of our race, as do many people. The slimness of some artists' bank accounts is not a measure of their greatness.