Create that mainstream Art Product that will mean I don't have to work to make ends meet?

didn't sell then, an axe made it legendary

"I'm not a fucking art whore like you," is what I say to creatives who suggest that I "Create that mainstream Art Product that will mean I don't have to work to make ends meet?"

It's happened before, when I was painting the kinds of red-shoe psycho-realist paintings (Red Hedz 1989 above) not wanted by the 1990s green-shoe art market.

"Why don't you just lie down when the mainstream free-market tells you and piss on your creative stomach, Mike Philblin?" is what the world really wants from people who think differently?

Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life. He was 'before his time' and was 'discovered' much later on, when the world caught up with his vision. He had to slum it around doing menial tasks for bread as part of his 'religious mission among the miners of Holland'.

It'll happen with the Free Planet novels and all the other crazy surrealist books I write for fun and kicks and education. And Liberty from Profit. And Awakening from Corporate Slavery. Now, people are suggesting I 'just write a mainstream novel that'll mean I can do what I want after that' but that's not how this shit works. You write a mainstream success novel, readers and public and agents and publishers are gonna want a sequel, then a franchise. Any art-whore falling for such a tempting prize will never escape such voracious demands from the mainstream world and will live in a prison of creating someone else's dream, rather than having fun doing what that creative does best. No matter how commercially unsuccessful an artist might be at it.

I really enjoy what I do, "If I have to work every now and then to fund that," what's really wrong with that? Plus, it gets me out of my 'writing shed at the foot of an imaginary garden'.