One of the primary problems is that there seems to be this schizophrenic disconnect in people's minds between the arts and material reality. It's like all these artists have read enough Marx to fight for economic equity, and to understand the materialist underpinnings of ideologies, but not enough to understand that you can't just flatly separate the work you do from conceptions of material value.

Every successful artist I know, that supports themself with their work, runs their practice like a business and structures their time and effort to maximize material returns and material communities (whether bounded by traditional currency or not). If you're not doing that, it's a hobby. Even the academic route to creative dominance requires you to inject assessments of relative value into your process, because art is social, and "successful" art is even more social. And people care about real value and utility, whether that's emotional utility or some other kind.

"My work is pure! I create, and material circumstances to nothing to influence my art!" Oh, bullshit. Shut the fuck up.

But as an addendum: one of the provinces of the occult is the bizarre continuum between thoughtforms experienced by our subjective consciousness, enacted in the MATERIAL patterns of our neurons, and the "external" matter those thoughtforms use themselves to influence. This is the hazy dominion of what Crowley calls "True Will", or just will in general-- I'll write more extensively about this in the future, but the upshot is: in a the unified system that is the relationship between your internal and external matter, where do we locate the influenced, and where the influencer? Do we make culture, or does it make us?