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Back to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, there's always been run-ins between benefactors and artists.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

Traditionally, art has been for the select few. We have been brainwashed to believe that Michelangelo had to pat you on the head at birth.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.

Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity.

Real artists free of the tedium of money can use, now, all of society as an idea factory.