Is this the end for Morrissey? After a troubled year in which misery's poet laureate seemed to cancel more shows than he announced, yet another South American tour has fallen through. The reason is not life-threatening illness, which sank another tour earlier this year and is at least on-brand for Morrissey, but something more dismal: money.

"I am informed today that the projected tour of South America is snuffed out, thus euthanised due, I'm reliably advised, to lack of funding," he wrote on the fansite True To You. "Cancellations and illness have sucked the life out of all of us, and the only sensible solution seems to be the art of doing nothing." With no record deal nor any new material since 2009, touring is supposedly his lifeline. Unsolicited advice from Amanda Palmer – the Mrs Mills of goth – that he should fund a new record through Kickstarter merely compounds the ignominy.

If Morrissey can't make a living out of playing to an audience as large and vociferous as the foam-flecked fundamentalists who follow him, there can be little hope for anyone else. But in some respects Morrissey is the author of his own marginalisation. His surprise rebirth after seven years' purdah in Los Angeles with You Are the Quarry in 2004 brought him to a whole new audience, selling 350,000 albums in the UK alone. But the man who once sang "I don't want to be judged/I would sooner be blindly loved" subsequently settled for the comforts of the fanbase, issuing endless interchangeable greatest hits, deluxe editions and live albums against only two more records of new material.

Then there was the refusal to contemplate that his current band and songwriting partnerships might have run their course. A Morrissey song of 2009 sounds much like one from 1997, and the live rendition of Johnny Marr's delicate This Charming Man that opened many Morrissey shows in recent years was criminally hamfisted and crude.

Meanwhile the public persona that used to provoke and entertain – "Reggae is vile", wishing unsanctioned biographer Johnny Rogan death in a car crash, "Cook Bernard Matthews" – became predictable, bitter and kneejerk. Likening Anders Breivik's massacre at Utøya to a day at KFC, describing the Chinese as a sub-species, and blaming the royal family for the suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha all tried the patience of any but the most committed Morrissey sycophants.

Yet his illnesses are undoubtedly real and serious, and Morrissey is hardly to blame for the collapse of the recorded music business. Though there are more than enough Morrissey fans to finance a new album via Kickstarter, it would paint him even more starkly as an artist for the converted only. Perhaps Morrissey's much-anticipated autobiography will break him out of this strange and self-created pocket universe, where he and his fans speak only to one another. If not, there remains one option that would bring modern England's greatest voice back to a mass audience. Somewhere, surely, Morrissey still has Johnny Marr's phone number.