Excellent point. Indeed, "time and chance overtake us all." However, I find it hard to reconcile the fatality of your argument with the argument itself. Why make the argument if it ends up being true in the end anyway? What's the point of anything? Well, you do it because you love it and the rewards don't matter. The problem is, we live in a world that has technology in it that would have connected Van Gogh to the one obscure collector that lived during his life time but never met him. Don't you think we should be fine tuning this technology so that the artist can know, in her life time, how big of an impact she has made on the world?