Wealth & Money Quote by Peter Sotos

A line like this only lands because it’s both a defense and a provocation. Peter Sotos isn’t offering a humblebrag about artistic purity; he’s trying to control the frame around work that people often approach as evidence, pathology, or exploitation. “I don’t publish … to make money” is a preemptive strike against the most legible motive the public can assign to transgressive art: profit off shock, monetize harm, cash out on taboo. He denies the cleanest accusation first.

The real subtext is that a different economy is operating. Sotos’ currency is attention, power, and the ability to force readers into complicity. “Not at all” isn’t just emphasis; it’s a dare, a refusal to let the audience resolve their discomfort by imagining a simple villain. If it’s not money, then what? Obsession, control, a desire to document, a desire to contaminate the reader’s moral comfort - all become plausible, and none are reassuring.

Context matters because Sotos’ reputation sits at the intersection of underground publishing and cultural panic about what should be unsayable. In that zone, claiming noncommercial intent functions like a legal brief and a manifesto at once: it asks to be judged as art while insisting art isn’t automatically absolution. The sentence is calibrated to make you argue with it. Even if you don’t believe him, you’re already inside his preferred terrain: motive, ethics, and the uneasy suspicion that “profit” is the least interesting reason someone might publish something dangerous.