I wholeheartedly support the claim that art cannot exist in a vacuum - I've ranted plenty of times about the whole notion of "autonomous" art (an invention of modernism), being problematic for that very reason.

But I disagree with idea that suffering for art is just "a corollary" to that. That would ignore that The Suffering Artist is an age old trope with a long history of examples of (IMO misplaced) hero-worshiping, which has nothing to do with this "complacent vacuum".

Yes, art (or science or tech or social change or whatever) is always created within a certain context, and this context may have obstacles that need to be overcome to create said art. Sometimes those obstacles involve suffering, and not everyone is willing to pay that price.

There is a romantic notion of believing in something greater than yourself and suffering for it, and sometimes that is true: Snowden was willing to suffer to get the truth out, and without it we wouldn't have known what we know now.

But knowing the context and the price of what you want to do, and paying it willingly does not imply that great art (any kind of "greatness") requires suffering, or worse: that an artwork becomes better if the artist suffered for it. That's an utterly banal reversal of causality.