Let’s say you’ve shown some work and it’s been panned—or, worse yet, ignored. What do you do? Jim Lewis, the novelist and art critic, has strong feelings on this subject. “If people dismiss your work,” he told me in an e-mail, “strive to make them hate it. If no one hates it, it might not be art. This is not because offending people is inherently valuable, nor even because new things always invite misunderstanding and disapprobation. Both of those are clichés. But any true gesture put out into the world is bound to please some and displease others. Don’t make your art go down that easy. Many of the artists I love best are widely despised (sometimes by each other). Don’t be afraid of this. It’s inevitable. Samuel Johnson said, ‘Fame is a shuttlecock. . . . To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.’ Often you can learn more from the boos than from the applause, particularly if you’re brave enough to really think about them. Those qualities in your work that bother people the most are often precisely the ones that should be cultivated, pushed so far out on the axis of vice that they come around to be virtues.”