Your question has three parts that are not at all consistent. “Going to Ivy League school but dropping out” is not indicative of any talent or intellect or genius.

Correlation between between intellect and just being good at anything is not demonstrated either. An excellent wordsmith does not make a great engineer, does nt make a great gamesman. People’s talents manifest in different ways.

And “successful” artists depends on how you define success. Many very talented artists do not succeed in the conventional sense. And Thomas Kinkade was very successful from a monetary standpoint, but he was no genius of a painter.

Not graduating from college does not necessarily imply either lack of intellect or not eventually being successful. Steve Jobs was a college dropout. Ability in one area does not imply ability in another. A person can be a great athlete or actor or artist without having any ability outside their area of expertise.

The currently popular theory is the grit criterion. How successful you are depends on determination. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule, which says that to be an expert in anything you must put in 10,000 hours of effort.

No. Most successful artists are lucky. Just like most successful ball players, stock pickers, writers, and so on.

Skill only gets you so far. If you’re going to be financially successful as an artist, you have to be lucky enough to find a buyer for your work. Are you familiar with the term “starving artists”. There’s a reason why they are called that.

I meant that these artists got into top schools, which made me think there’s a link with general intellect and being a good artist.

The drop out part was unnecessary to add…

Geniuses for having talent up the wazoo, yes.

My mom was an artist but far from being a genius.

More or less everyone is a genius. What people recognize as genius or don’t, even in themselves, is about whether the person has realized, embraced, and used their genius in visible recognizable ways that society values or labels as genus.

Some people however do art even though there genius is elsewhere, just as many people don’t discover, honor, or find opportunities to use and show their own genius, and/or do work unrelated to their genius

I had an art teacher in high school who thought he was an artist. Other people thought so, too. And he could paint, just like I take a color photograph, copy it on paper/canvas, and paint it. No talent is required for this type of so-called “art.” Actually, the guy was a hack! He really had no talent.
My father had some artistic talent, but not enough to satisfy himself. He did a water color back in high school that is just the best! And one oil painting that everybody just goes ga-ga over.
So a real artist has talent! Something he/she was born with and something that just FLOWS. I’ve seen people who just doodle and the stuff they draw will just knock your socks OFF! It’s fabulous!

My mom’s art. She was raised in the Pacific Northwest and it showed in most of her work. This one looks like Oregon, but I remember she took this from the back of a Reader’s Digest.