Wealth & Money Quote by Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson makes the line land the way her best work does: deadpan, slightly futuristic, and quietly furious about how bureaucracy flattens a life. She starts with the innocent premise of “hobby,” a word that usually signals leisure, self-care, maybe a ceramics phase. Then she pivots to the IRS, yanking art out of the realm of identity and into the realm of accounting. The joke is structural: if you don’t profit, the state downgrades your practice into a pastime, as if meaning only counts after monetization.

The subtext is an artist’s origin story rewritten as a tax form. Anderson isn’t confessing she lacked direction; she’s pointing at the cultural pressure to justify time. In America, work is real, hobbies are cute, and art is tolerated until it needs resources. The IRS classification becomes a proxy for a broader logic that treats creativity as suspicious unless it behaves like a business. It’s a bureaucratic version of the question artists hear constantly: “But what do you do?”

Context matters because Anderson’s career lives at the intersection of avant-garde experimentation and public-facing success. She’s not an obscure romantic; she’s someone who eventually did “make money with it.” That makes the punchline sharper, not softer. It’s a reminder that even for a celebrated musician-performer, legitimacy can hinge on paperwork, not vision. The humor is protective armor, but the critique cuts: if institutions can rename your art a hobby, they can also decide it doesn’t deserve to exist.