The audience is not the maker's adversary or their employer — it is the other half of the conversation that the work initiates, and the quality of that conversation depends on both sides. To make work only for yourself is a form of refusal; to make work only for your imagined audience is a form of abandonment of the creative responsibility. The most honest relationship is one in which the maker makes what is true and trusts that truth to find the reader who needs it, without either ignoring the reader entirely or writing to please them.
Mura