After all, what is a painting worth?

 ''

(...) After all, what is a painting worth? It's a soiled piece of canvas with some dried paint on it, let's say, that's one definition of that kind of thing... and to make it valuable has a great many elements involved which don't necessarily have to do with the quality of the painting, I mean, good painters like Vermeer can die in poverty and be lost for hundreds of years, and come to the surface again. One must surmise that there must have been others that never came to the surface again. Why did this come to the surface again, that's just one branch of it, where did they go? Where were their works sold and resold? For a living painter, it's a question of getting his work out, and on the market and visible. That is done by letting yourself be completely robbed by a dealer, to whom you give everything. But that's on the condition that you are at him everyday, poking him in the ribs, and showing him that's it's to his own interest to get your stuff out there, because he got it so cheap from you. Then, there's the games of the cocktail parties, and who fucks who, and all that, that's there, but the basic fact is that if your work doesn't get out there, it's not on the market, it's not seen. It doesn't matter if it's in the museums, like, my stuff is in all the pertinent museums, not in England, but in America, and here in France. But I don't have a dealer so...

''

Brion Gysin,

em entrevista a Genesis P-Orridge e Peter Christopherson

Paris, 1980

extraído de 

«His name was master»,

 página 66

edição Trapart Books