"In music, when you do something new, something original, you're an amateur. Your imitators - these are the professionals.
It is these imitators who are interested not in what the artist did, but the means which he used to do it. This is where craft emerges as an absolute, an authoritarian position that divorces itself from the creative pulse of the originator. The imitator is the greatest enemy of originality. The "freedom" of the artist is boring to him, because in freedom he cannot reenact the role of the artist.
There is, however, another role he can and does play. It is this imitator, this "professional" that makes art into culture."
Morton Feldman 'The Anxiety of Art' Art in America (Vol. 61 No 5 September/October 1973) pp88-93 [dated 1965] As reprinted in Friedman, B.H. Give My Regards To Eighth Street; Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Exact Change, Cambridge MA, 2000
