There’s an article in a recent New Yorker about John Keats the poet, whose poems were received with universal and often vicious scorn when they first came out.  He died of TB at a very young age, feeling that his life had been wasted.  Only after his death did the world come to know him as one of the greatest poets of the English language.  He kept writing because he had to write, just as those musicians played while no one listened.  There’s always hope in an artist’s heart that someone out there, somewhere, sometime, will pay attention.

A friend defined stupidity to me once as doing the same thing over and over with the same result, each time expecting the results to be different.  I am thankful for the stupidity of artists, who keep doing what they do whether anyone pays attention or not.  Otherwise we would not have “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” and last night, my toes in their fancy high-heeled shoes would have remained untapped.