Noah Becker’s got it right in his Instagram posts, and Whitehot Magazine: being a serious artist when you have no wealth and no connections, when your chances of ever being seen or taken seriously by the institution lie somewhere near lotto-winning odds, is effectively sticking it to The Man.

It’s telling the world that birthed you with no art-world privilege that you’re going to be an artist anyway, in spite of the personal, emotional, intellectual, and financial cost.

That’s you being an authentic artist in the biggest, broadest way. Blind to fashion, averse to art-world artifice. Particularly if you live in the US, where support for the individual artist is precisely zero.

That’s you being twenty times the artist any of these trustafarian clowns living in their gentrified ivory towers, splashing out their giant, vapid paintings and silly sculptures could possibly be.

The institution exclusively recognizes and elevates its own kind, and the institution was born and raised in golden gravy. That’s not the world you asked for when you were born an artist, but it’s the world you’ve got.

Keep working. Fill rooms and attics and basements with your work. Get seen in any storefront or hotel lobby or coffee shop that’ll have you.

You’re the real thing. Keep stickin’ it to The Man.