“The credit line is a recognition of value and worth. It’s an imprimatur of that value. It corresponds to a universal need for recognition – for the carpenter who makes a seamless joining, to the electrical worker who (miraculously these days) lines up an outlet plumb to the floor, to your tag sale neighbor who makes a hand-lettered sign that’s attractive as well as readable.
Recognition of work well done is singularly important to the creative artist. He works for weeks, if not months or years, in the dark on something that may never see the light of day or equally painful, on something that never should have seen the light of day.
‘We work in the dark,’ Henry James wrote, ‘we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'”
— R. O. Blechman