There are two ways to make a living from creative work. The first: make something so undeniable that people hand you their money voluntarily. Metallica never begged anyone to buy a record. They made music that millions of people needed to own. The transaction was simple — craft in exchange for access. The second: build an infrastructure that pays you regardless of whether the audience shows up. Grants. Residencies. Institutional commissions. Academic positions. A network of funding bodies staffed by people who share your aesthetic vocabulary and will keep writing cheques as long as you keep speaking it. The second path has been the dominant model in fine art for decades. It works. But it has a side effect: it lets artists be contemptuous of the audience, because the audience was never the customer. The customer is the grant committee. The sponsor. The gallerist. The people with the actual money have a completely different set of criteria than the people standing in the gallery. This is why the art world panics when the public develops opinions. An audience that expects to be entertained is an audience that has leverage. And artists who've never had to earn that audience — only impress a panel — find this threatening. It's not entitlement when the audience expects something for their money. It's commerce. The entitlement is expecting to be supported without being undeniable. #audience #customer