Forced by Circumstances

It is amazing how torture it is to feel forced by circumstances to apply one’s own effort to something that delivers nothing more than money. To apply one’s own effort, and almost always the bulk of one’s own time… I see the average artist in despair before the seemingly insoluble question: how not to be useful to other human beings, or at least, how not to be outrageously useful, strictly useful, and still survive? How not sum up one’s own life in a creeping utilitarianism? How to be an artist, and not a commercial manager, a designer, a salesman? How to be an artist and, at the very least, abstain from any financial necessity in the production of one’s own work? It seems that the supreme merit boils down to being lucky…