Artists who are employed or do contract work are often hired because someone is trying to make money off something that makes use of their work, and their ability to make money off that often depends on copyright. So it's still ultimately a dependency on copyright, just with one layer of separation in between.
That leaves artists who make an income from doing some kind of performance, like concerts or plays. I guess that doesn't really require copyright, but it's a pretty limited subset of artists for whom this is possible.