As an artist who has yet to be recognized for my achievements, and as someone who also knows other artists who have yet to be recognized for theirs, I have long adhered to the belief that quality rises in the end. To what end, you might wonder? Well, within me there is this idea of the ultimate. And with this, there is the notion that my most dedicated readers have yet to be born. Not only has this comforted me, but also it has contributed to my need to keep going. (If, for nothing else, I owe it to them—my future readers.) Furthermore, I have also battled the reductive belief that fame equals quality. Because as we have seen, it is not uncommon for great artists to go overlooked in the immediate, only to be discovered later by the future generations who will appreciate them. Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, the 2012 documentary on the musician Sixto Rodriguez, demonstrates this. […]