It didn't make sense to me. Maybe he was just looking on the bright side. But somewhere, either George or Mike Kuchar said something to the effect that it's GOOD if no one watches your movies because it means you can do whatever you want.
Maybe he had a point. Lenny Bruce was a failed comic reduced to working as MC in a strip club. It dawned on him that no one was there to see him. They didn't care what he said, so he was free to say anything he wanted. This was how he blossomed into a cultural icon, although it did kill him.
During the Great Depression, artists in New York realized they weren't going to make any money, so they did what they wanted and New York became the new focus of the Art World. Before then it was Paris.
Related in some way to the Taoist concept of Wu Wei. It's the idea that you do a lot better if you don't try. It's contradictory since their ultimate goal is still power and success, and you do have to try a little. At least Lenny Bruce and those artists had given up hope. I doubt that Jackson Pollock thought dribbling paint would be his ticket to the big time.
Reminds me of a point Dave Kehr made in a 1990 Chicago Tribune piece about Hollywood Poverty Row studios, that these low-budget movies were "made in the absolute certainty that no film critic would see them, no sophisticated public would encounter them and no financial reward whatever would accrue to their auteurs", but also that "There are few tributes to the indomitability of the human spirit more moving than that of the artistically ambitious Poverty Row picture."
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