The point of a career as an artist, you might say, if you are lucky enough to have one, is to express yourself. Sure. Of course. Self-expression is the thrust of it. But it also becomes about identification; it becomes the bedrock of who you are as a person. I think there is something about accomplishment—where you become so embittered by the realities of how hard it is to make it, to get anywhere at all, even to a place where you’re broke and living in a rotting shack in upstate New York and sleeping on a borrowed fifty-year-old mattress—that it is no longer possible to connect emotionally with anyone who had it easier than you or, more particularly, differently from you.

The struggle to be a working artist is its own special kind of challenge. It involves so many compromises and instabilities and trade-offs, you find yourself automatically discounting anybody who had it normal—anybody who had a five-year plan after college or, more likely, graduate school. Is it legitimately hard to get a decent corporate job and climb the ladder and go into a fluorescent-blinking-cubicle cage every day and make shapeless conversation with people you can’t stand, to cash the indignity of such a paycheck every other week, to stick it out so you can feed your family, afford a home and a car and retirement? Yes. It is. It is very hard, but it is a different kind of hard from knowing that you ought to fly yourself to Venice and lie about a meeting with a collector so that you have an excuse to go to a party in a palazzo that you know will be photographed and thus place you on the party pages in the correct section of the intellectual department store, even though you don’t speak a word of Italian, even though your bank account will subsequently be empty for weeks, which will eat you up inside until something comes of it, which it often does, often enough that you make those kinds of bets with unnerving frequency.

A five-year-plan kind of life is a different kind of hard than lying on the floor and waiting for paint to dry—than stuffing your brain with random information on blind faith that it may ferment and hatch and become something new—than putting all of yourself into something that eventually somebody will buy and take away from you.