Most independent artists will disagree with this statement. They do it for passion, to communicate, to tell stories, to fulfill their own urges. Some works incidentally hit a sweet spot and become commercial successes, but that's not their purpose. On the other hand, the 'art' you see being marketed around you is made specifically to be marketed and sold, with little personal connection to the artist, and often against their own preferences. That's "content".
Is that what they tell you when you’re standing in the gallery with a checkbook? Or in the boardroom with a signature?
No, you almost never see art that wasn’t meant to be sold. Public art pieces are commissioned (sold), art in galleries were created by professional artists (even if commercially unsuccessful) 99.99999% of the time.
Surely if this wasn’t true, you could point to a few specific examples of art — or even broad categories of art — that weren’t made to be sold and that you have personally seen?
I think you're just interpreting the meaning of "made to be sold" very literally. Of course artists want to make a living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold; but that is not the main motivation behind making the art, where commercial "art" - advertising, mainstream cinema, pop music, most art galleries, anime, 80% of what you see in arts and crafts fairs, pieces in IKEA - is created with profit as the main motive.
Going back to the origin of this, stating that Ghibli style videos generated with SORA (which the OP initially called "content") are equivalent to Studio Ghibli movies because they are both "art made to be sold" would be wild. A film like Spirited Away took over 1 million hours of work, if making money was the main goal it would have never happened.
> Of course artists want to make a living and have their art be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold
"they want their to be appreciated, so they expect pieces to be sold" is a clever trick but one is not related to the other. One could want their art to be appreciated and never sell it, but virtually no one would see this art for a variety of reasons including the fact that marketability increases visibility and that there is very, very little amateur art that is worth looking at, much less promoting to a larger audience.
It seems you agree that in fact art (that anyone sees) is overwhelmingly made to be sold.
I didn't say anything about their "main motivation" and neither you nor I (nor even the artist, frankly) could say much about what someone's main motivation is.
What we can say is that nearly all of the art anyone sees was in fact made to be sold, which is the specific claim that I made.
