Well depending on your definition of pixel art, yeah I'd say there are a very small amount of public pixel artists left in the world. After the fall of the Doll Empire, most pixel art disappeared. All that I've seen left are you guys, a few doll makers, microhero communities, and the occasional sprite creator.
Yeah haha whatever happened to all those people who used to make dolls.
I never made one myself but I used to like seeing a bunch of the stuff these people made... nowadays I don't really see much of that anymore. And I agree, I only see PJ, PL and a very few other sites where people do pixel art.
There are still plenty. PixelJoint is pretty big, there's new people joining here every day, etc.
We are a dying art though, mostly because of screen resolutions. We have to double and eventually triple, quadruple, etc our art. People used to see pixels everywhere on their screen, now there are young people who never even had a screen where you could clearly see the pixels.
In a few years, kids will be going "what's with the squares?". The pixel itself is just dissapearing. Right now it's kept alive a little with DS games, but it's pretty much the only console platform that still has visible pixels and thus a use for pixel art.
Yeah, that might be one of the reason why PA is dissapearing... and that's the thing Gil, a lot of the people in PJ are gone, same in here... retired I bet... so that's a crowd that basically don't exist unless they come back into the habit.
...and that's not to say half the people in PJ are here also, so if we're to sum up for a total of more than 30,000 I still have my doubts.
There isn't really a way to get people into pixel art... I have tried sharing tutorials and stuff and motivating people to give it a shot, but meh no one has the guts nor the long term commitment to even bother starting.