Not that artists can’t be motivated by joy, but only that the work they produce under its sway, or in its thrall, has the same potential, aesthetically, as a work born of despair, insofar as neither work will succeed unless the artist, when embarking on it, is able to subsume the fervor of those sentiments, or spiritual conditions, into the coldness or remoteness, which isn’t to say heartlessness, of technique, which is really only talent, when talent is put to use, and which can be measured by one’s ability, when manipulating the medium in which one practices, to bring the audience into contact with a truth that cannot be parted from its fictive roots.