Wealth & Money Quote by Lydia Lunch

Lunch’s defiance lands because it refuses the one scoreboard culture insists on keeping. The line takes the most common insult leveled at underground artists - if you didn’t monetize big, you didn’t “make it” - and flips it into a diagnosis of the insult itself. “Swelled astronomically” is doing quiet work: it mocks the bloated, almost cartoonish fantasy of wealth as destiny, the idea that success should be visible from space. Her diction makes money sound less like stability and more like a grotesque bodily symptom.

The intent isn’t to romanticize poverty or pretend rent doesn’t matter. It’s to protect a different metric: impact, autonomy, artistic risk, surviving the industry without being swallowed by it. Lunch came up in the late-70s/80s no wave and downtown New York scene, where provocation and abrasion were aesthetics and ethics. In that ecosystem, mainstream acceptance wasn’t just unlikely; it could read as contamination. So the quote functions like a boundary line: you can judge me by sales if you want, but that says more about your values than mine.

The subtext is even sharper: capitalism is always trying to rebrand itself as self-esteem. If your bank account is your identity, then every lean year becomes a moral failure. Lunch refuses that emotional trap. She’s not asking to be exempt from economics; she’s insisting that art’s value can’t be audited.