'Art for art' (also known as 1/1 NFTs) was big in the first half of this year, when artists were able to be very visible and it was kind of easy to sell art. Later half of the year the bull run started kicking in and the '10k' projects started pouring in and taking over. I expect the artists doing best during bear markets when people buy for love, and bull markets being more for bigger/easier projects where people want to ride the wave as you called it.
I also just now have learned the differences in 'generative art', some are more 'real' generative than others, hoping to write a post about that after this week, gotta rest from an exam and some study days first :D It's an interesting market to observe, really fits my Dopamine brain, it's sort of 'good' I haven't had time to dive into it deep, I earned 2 ETH from a mint I had made in 2018 lol and just bought a few NFTs from that. Will have time to dive a little deeper in the next few weeks though, so stay tuned :D