Daily Inspiration Quote by John Zorn

Against the myth of the arts as a sleek “industry,” John Zorn is describing something closer to a cell of conspirators: tiny, under-resourced, and stubbornly functional. The inventory of absences is the point. No office. No phone line. Not even the minimal trappings that signal legitimacy in a grant application or a press kit. By stacking those deficits, he reframes deprivation as design. This isn’t a pity speech; it’s an aesthetic statement about governance, scale, and control.

Zorn’s work has long lived in the spaces where institutions struggle to categorize: downtown experimental music, genre collision, self-curated scenes, artist-run infrastructure. In that context, “we make it work” reads less like bootstrap bravado than a quiet refusal of administrative gravity. Offices and dedicated lines aren’t neutral conveniences; they’re portals for bureaucracy, compromise, and someone else’s timetable. Running things “out of our own homes” collapses the distance between life and labor, composition and logistics, community and distribution. It also signals trust: a small circle, direct contact, minimal intermediaries.

There’s subtextual pride in the scale itself. “Two or three people” implies agility, speed, and taste-driven decision-making - a boutique operation that can take risks precisely because it doesn’t need to feed a large staff or satisfy corporate metrics. In an era when cultural production is often measured by reach, Zorn is asserting a different success criterion: autonomy. The line functions as a reminder that some of the most influential cultural ecosystems are built not in offices, but in living rooms, by people willing to trade polish for freedom.