The Artist as Producer

The fact is that despite the famous avant-garde iconoclasm, being an artist in SoHo remains exactly what it has been in Western culture for over two hundred years: the humanist vocation, par excellence; the great secular analogue to the religious calling, lush with a myth rather like the one that accompanies the religious choice; a life of poverty sustained by inner exultation; uncompromising truth to a vision that probably will be misunderstood or even persecuted by the blind unreceiving materialistic world; a complicated and exhausting search for a private discipline; artistic dry spells followed by bursts of inspiration, rather like the search for the Spirit; a struggle to accept and believe in one's work, rather like the obstacles to faith. And for the artist, as for the religious, there is the rationale of the glory to come, possibly (grim, glorious possibility) posthumously. Van Goghsville. Anyway, somewhere down the line hovers the prospect of fame, a variety of admiration available to nobody else in the culture, and maybe even money. It is hard to beat.

- Stephen Koch, Where the Avant Gaurde Work the Hardest, Esquire, 1975