Creativity Quote by Tony Conrad

A throwaway line that quietly admits an entire underground has been running on side conversations, scarcity, and unfinished business. Tony Conrad isn’t name-dropping John Cale to flex proximity to the Velvet Underground era; he’s signaling how avant-garde culture actually survives: through long, repeated, often fruitless talk about logistics, ownership, and access. “Two decades” lands like a punchline and an accusation. In a scene that romanticizes ephemerality, Conrad points to the less poetic truth that the work can disappear simply because nobody can locate it, duplicate it, or agree on who gets to.

La Monte is almost certainly La Monte Young, whose music is legendary and notoriously hard to hear in sanctioned form. Conrad’s phrasing - “what to do about La Monte” - turns a person into a problem to be solved, hinting at bruised histories: interpersonal rifts, control over documentation, competing claims to authorship in collaborative milieus. The second clause, “how to get copies of our work,” is where the stakes become political. Copies aren’t just convenience; they’re power. In experimental art, the archive is the afterlife, and access to recordings determines who gets written into history.

Conrad’s intent reads as both pragmatic and barbed: he’s describing the mundane labor of retrieval while implying that institutional recognition often arrives too late, and only after the artists have fought their own private battles over the basic right to be heard again.