It’s no insuperable burden to pay the reader to read your work.
Henry Miller
A: They did pay Glenn Gould to play the piano.
He didn’t have to have a concert career, performing in front of audiences.
He could make a living making records. At home, eventually.
Q: I guess that’s true.
A: I maintained my artistic integrity, and stayed faithful to the truth of my vision, by disintermediating. By doing it myself.
Publishing myself on the worldwide web, and in self-published pamphlets.
I didn’t get here by accident, I got here by design.
If you take money for it, they own it. Whoever gives you the money.
It’s like Duchamp said about the artist integrating himself into the money society.
Who says you have to? Where does it say you have to?
And then, of course, there is the terrific commercialization. So many artists, so many one-man shows, so many dealers and collectors and critics who are just lice on the back of the artists. Some of them are still my friends, but I have no respect for the profession of dealer or critic. And with commercialization has come the integration of the artist into society, for the first time in a hundred years. In my time we artists were pariahs, we knew it and we enjoyed it. But today the artist is integrated, and so he has to be paid, and so he has to keep producing for the market. It's a vicious circle. And artists are such supreme egos! It's disgusting. No, the only solution for the great man of tomorrow in art is to go underground. He may be recognized after his death, if he's lucky. Not having to deal with the money society on its own terms, he won't have to be integrated into it, and he won't become contaminated, as all the others are.
I don’t look at my failure as a failure, I look at it as a success.
Q: You could conceivably finish 40-Year Run without selling a book to
A: Celebrate Jack Saunders Day by self-publishing a pamphlet.
I could call it 40-Year Run.