Nothing in my professional life extends far into the future. I don't know if I'll be able to extend the lease on my theater space. I don't know how many tutoring students I'll get each year, and therefore, how much income I'll have. I'm uncertain about what will happen with my writing, whether I'll sell more or less of it or none of it. The future could involve more or less success, but I quite literally cannot count on it. I have to make things happen. There's no job I can count on going to on a Monday morning, even a job I hate. My life has been like this for at least six years—since I quit teaching full-time (which I hated, by the way). New York life has been a high wire act, a kind of constant gamble.1
The art market, and in a sense all arts in the modern world, are connected to the primal sense of quasi-mystical communion that craft is supposed to bestow upon human-made objects: the quasi-mystical authentication process produced by a craftsperson with natural endowment—by the natural forces that fill up a craftsperson, the natural gifts that are channeled through a craftsperson into an object.