Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Dixon

There is a quiet radicalism in how Bill Dixon frames ambition: not as conquest, but as infrastructure. The conditional opening, "If I had money", is doing heavy lifting. It isn’t daydreaming about fame or comfort; it’s a blunt admission that the main barrier to experimental culture is capital. Dixon isn’t romanticizing scarcity. He’s naming it, then pivoting to what resources would actually be for: a place, a platform, a scene.

The wish list reads like a blueprint for a self-sustaining art ecosystem. An old building suggests permanence and reuse, a physical counterargument to the disposable, gig-to-gig economy musicians often live in. "Music performances" sits alongside "lithographs" and "shows of paintings" without hierarchy, which is its own aesthetic manifesto. Dixon’s world is interdisciplinary by necessity and by belief: sound, image, print, and space as parts of one continuous practice, not separate markets with separate gatekeepers.

The subtext is institutional critique. When he says "those things that I’m interested in doing", he’s not describing a hobbyist’s whim; he’s asserting artistic agency against a culture industry that tends to fund what is legible, profitable, and easily categorized. For an avant-garde jazz musician who came up in a mid-century America that routinely underfunded Black experimental art, this is also about control: owning the venue means owning the terms of listening. Money, in Dixon’s framing, isn’t the point. Autonomy is.