It isn’t a highway and it doesn’t have lanes |
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It isn’t a highway and it doesn’t have lanes
27 February 2017 | 63 Comments
By Steven Brust
As long as there is class society in general and capitalism in particular there will be conflict between art and commercialism. How could their not be? In a society in which money is tied to fame and those two things combine into the official social measure of quality, any artist (in the broadest sense of the term) with a hint of self-awareness combined with the least shred of integrity has to, at some point, confront the issue.
While there are those who write to live, many of us live to write. Commercial success means less time doing a day job that perhaps we hate, and more time for our passion. To be sure, some of us—I include myself—have, simply because of luck, never had to face the choice between writing what satisfies us, and writing what will generate income. But for many, it can be a constant and difficult choice.